François drove himself. He had fired his chauffeur Landolt long ago, with a surprisingly generous final payment. The car wasn’t easy to steer, but François endured the pains in his arms as part of his penance.
During the long journey the two men said very little to one another. Although they were both thinking of the same thing, they were thinking about it in quite different ways.
In Mulhouse the after-effects of the war were still tangibly apparent, and they had to share a hotel room. When Pinchas put on his tefillin for morning prayer, François looked awkwardly aside, as one studiously ignores another person’s nudity.
Without agreeing in advance, they both did without breakfast. As soon as it was light outside, they were already sitting in the car again.
For several weeks during the war the front line had passed precisely between Mulhouse and Thann, and the road on which they were driving had been fiercely fought over. One could still imagine that the narrow avenue must once have looked very picturesque, even though it was now lined with ragged, splintered trees. Some of them were already showing green shoots again.
Thann was an unprepossessing little provincial town, or rather it had once been an unprepossessing little provincial town. Then, with the clearsightedness that the war always brings, the armies had recognised that its houses were not really houses at all, in fact, but cover for enemy soldiers, and had systematically shot them to pieces.
The big square in front of the church, or in front of what the gunners on both sides had left of the church, had once been the assembly point for newly arrived troops. Now the rubble of the demolished houses piled up there into good-sized mountains, shattered gables here, burnt wood there. For once it was not the residents but the stones of a town that had gathered there, as if to discuss how things would go from here.
An elderly gentleman with the armband of an auxiliary gendarme with a severe expression ensured that no one offloaded his rubble on the wrong mountain. Where chaos had long prevailed, rules and regulations could only be beneficial.
When François and Pinchas asked the way to their destination, at first he looked at them suspiciously. But then François’s Swiss German accent convinced him that these were no Boches in front of him, and he kindly gave them information. So take the next left past the mairie — ‘You can still read the sign, even though there’s only a wall left of the building’ — and then carry straight on, to the little stream with the improvised bridge of wooden planks. Not across the bridge, which would probably not have supported the weight of the car — ‘A lovely automobile, by the way, a Buchet, am I right?’ — but turn right and keep on the path along the water. ‘Or even better: leave the car by the bridge and walk the rest. The wheels might sink into the mud, you see. A lot of people have been there recently.’
The path was lined with a blackthorn hedge. The little violet-blue sloes still hung from the branches. François couldn’t stand the silence and said: ‘They should have been picked after the first frost.’
He received no reply.
When they had reached their destination, François took off his hat. Pinchas shook his head, and he put it back on.
The cemetery wasn’t fenced; it wasn’t really a proper cemetery. They had just taken a field where once maize or rape had grown. Certainly not the best kind of ground; peasants are economical people, and corpses bring in no income.
Later they would set up a monument here, perhaps a martial sandstone poilu, watching alertly towards the East, his gun ready in his hand. Once a year they would lower a wreath at his feet, always with the same ribbon and the same speech. Then they would also carve all the names into an imposing plinth, arranged by year, and alphabetically within each year. Then it would be easier to find an Alfred Meijer.
Rubric 1914, between Marceau and Milleret.
But for now the dead had to be their own monument.
There, in the place where they began their search, lay the fallen of 1917. It was a long journey from the end to the beginning of the war, but François and Pinchas did not allow themselves a shortcut, but paced out the line of graves in the sequence in which they had been laid. Always one row to the left and a row to the right.
1917.
1916.
1915.
The closer they got to them, the more often they had to bend to decipher the names. In those few years the letters had faded, just as memory fades, in which someone is at first a hero, but then only a corpse, a name and then nothing at all.
On some graves there lay the remains of flowers. As they decayed, they emulated the fate of the men for whom they had been brought.
Then they found him. Meijer, Alfred. 1914.
François bent down to the grave, as clumsy as an old man. He ran his right hand through the dried leaves that the wind had formed into a mound. The actual mound of the grave had long since become one with the ground again.
He picked up a stone from the ground, not a pebble, as is customary in Jewish cemeteries, but a sharp-edged piece of rock, of the kind that repeatedly comes to the surface, however carefully ploughed it is. But there was no gravestone on which he could lay it as a sign of commemoration, so he just dropped the stone, which sank into the pile of rotten leaves.
François rose to his feet very slowly. His back would not fully straighten.
‘Please, Pinchas,’ he said.
‘I don’t know if it’s right.’
‘Is anything right in this world?’ said François. And then, after a pause, ‘It’s what Mina would have wanted.’
And so it was that Pinchas Pomeranz spoke the Kaddish at a Christian grave, Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey raba.
The Kaddish for Alfred Meijer, who had been made a Christian, and a Swiss citizen, from which he had benefited not at all.
The Kaddish for a Jew with a cross on his grave.
1937
55
The tables had been cleared; only Chanele and Arthur were still sitting there. The nice woman with the hygienic white bonnet had wanted to take her tablecloth away, but Chanele had refused, quite violently, as she sometimes did, and the woman had nodded pleasantly and just wiped down the bluish-white oil-cloth with a sponge.
Bluish-white meaning milky food.
‘It’ll be breakfast in a minute,’ said Chanele, even though she had just eaten her bread and butter and drunk her malt coffee. ‘They will bring you a plate as well. Please join us.’
She was usually at her most alert shortly after getting up. That was why Arthur liked going home early when he visited his mother in the old people’s home in Lengnau. The last time she had asked him to go with her to the cemetery, and even though he knew that she had forgotten that wish long ago, he still felt obliged to fulfil it for her.
Janki had come from Alsace back then, so he wasn’t from one of the two old Jewish communities. Still, he had insisted on being buried in the cemetery shared between Endingen and Lengnau, not in Baden, where he had lived for so long, and certainly not in Zurich, his last, unloved dwelling place. He and Chanele had explained the fact that they had moved there anyway by saying they wanted to be closer to the children, but it was probably more important that Janki’s leg had got worse over the years, and he didn’t trust small-town doctors. Now, at the University Hospital they couldn’t help him either, even though they had tried to do so shortly before his death of necrosis.
All the old furniture, even the big mahogany table, had been sold long ago by then. Arthur had only asked for the Tantalus, in which the golden fluid was evaporating more and more. The old Shabbos lamp from Endingen, about which Mimi and Chanele had never been able to agree, now hung over Hinda and Zalman’s dinner table in Rotwandstrasse.