She didn’t really mean it, because she had now spent forty years living in the same place, she had grown up in the flat on Morgartenstrasse and had, in spite of the fact that it had far too many rooms, taken it over quite naturally after Pinchas and Mimi’s death and never changed anything in it. She often didn’t step into Pinchas’s office, its desk still covered with unread papers, for weeks at a time, she only had disagreements with the cleaning lady and hence kept coming up with plans for a change. They remained plans, because there was something that always held her back: just as a jar of formaldehyde captures a scientific specimen for all time, the flat preserved for her the young girl she had once been, the smitten teenager with her bedside table full of bonbons that smelled of almonds and rosewater.
After dinner, and this too had become a tradition, they both sat together in the sitting room, where the bronzed oak-leaf wreath from Arthur’s Gymnastics Society days still hung on the wall, and the tantalus, unopened since the previous century, still stood among the books on the shelf. Only a bachelor could have kept the leather armchairs, rubbed dull with use, for so many years; they were unsightly, yet as comfortable as a pair of worn-out slippers. ‘They’re a good match for me,’ thought Arthur.
It was part of their shared ritual that Arthur took a cigar from the box that a grateful patient gave him every year as mishloach manot at Purim, turned it around between his fingers, without really knowing what one was actually supposed to look out for in that exploratory rustling sound, and then lit it, puffing the while. It usually went out soon afterwards, and ended up forgotten in the ashtray; Arthur didn’t particularly like cigars, but would have felt ungrateful if he hadn’t used the present at all.
Désirée drank port, ‘an old maid’s drink’, as she called it. She emphasised her old-maid status with her hairstyle: parted in the middle, the way she had worn it as a young girl. Except that her hair was thinner now, and showing its first grey strands.
Today too everything could have been as it always was. But their conversation, which usually revolved around pleasantly trivial matters, kept drifting inexorably towards the same point, where it was tugged by the overwhelming current of facts into the same unchanging whirlwind. Beyond the border, just a few kilometres from Zurich, the world had been thrown out of joint, the pub politicians had left the regulars’ table for the government benches, and published their thuggish slogans as legal documents.
In his letters Ruben gave an account of the fresh torments that were constantly being introduced, all with the same goal in mind: to drive as many Jews as possible out of Germany. His Halberstadt congregation had shrunk almost by half in the previous four years, often with an apparently minor detail providing the final impulse to emigration. For example the ‘Stürmer box’, a display case carved in the old German style with the latest edition of Streicher’s hate sheet; it had been put up right by the entrance to the Klaus Synagogue, so that the faithful had to push their way past the caricatures of girl-defiling Jewish doctors and blood-sucking Jewish bankers on their way to service. For others it was a simple question in their children’s maths lesson that was the final straw. In a letter, Ruben had quoted the example from a school textbook: ‘Some intellectual professions in Berlin were dominated by Jews during the Weimar Republic. So among theatre people the Jewish proportion was eighty per cent, among lawyers sixty per cent, among doctors forty per cent, among university teachers in the Philosophy faculty twenty-five per cent. Show these figures in a graph!’ A committee member in the congregation, a soldier from the Great War with German nationalist leanings, who had sworn not to be driven from his fatherland under any circumstances, had emigrated overnight, after a polite voice had explained to him, when he had tried to send a telegram by telephone, that Jewish names could no longer be spelled out on the phone, it was incompatible with the racial pride of German postal officials.
‘A whole country has gone mad,’ Arthur said. ‘We can thank God that we live in Switzerland.’
‘Can we really do that?’ Désirée ran her fingernail thoughtfully along the rim of her glass. ‘Maybe the mad people haven’t yet floated to the surface here.’
Again, it wasn’t the first time they had had this conversation either, and on this subject too they both argued like an old married couple, each one knowing the views of the other so well that they react to certain words even before they are uttered. Désirée knew better than Arthur himself that he couldn’t imagine the world as anything other than reasonable, with laws which, while they might sometimes have been abused, were still correct in their fundamental traits. For a person like him there simply had to be reliable rules, because otherwise one lost one’s bearings. Arthur, for his part, knew Désirée’s fundamental scepticism about anything that proclaimed its rationality and objectivity too noisily. Behind that lay her firm conviction that unreason and blind emotion always lay behind such things. She had inherited that attitude from her father. As long as he lived, Pinchas had never got over the fact that the very first people’s initiative in Switzerland had been to forbid shechita, that a new law had immediately been used to create a new injustice. ‘An individual can make judgements,’ was the lesson he had learned from that. ‘The mass know only prejudices.’ And as if to prove this thesis, what had been one of the first rulings made by Hitler’s government? A prohibition on shechita. ‘We’re being forced into vegetarianism,’ Ruben had written in one of his letters.
‘Are we really supposed to wait until the same thing happens here? It might be more intelligent to start packing before it’s too late.’
‘To emigrate where?’
Désirée spread her arms, a gesture that took in the whole world, then lowered them again so that the world one could flee into dissolved and fell into a thousand pieces. ‘Anywhere,’ she said.
‘That would be cowardice.’
Désirée nodded. ‘And we aren’t brave enough to be cowardly.’
She didn’t have to explain what she meant by that. If Alfred had been brave enough at the outbreak of the war simply to run away, to desert, to go into hiding — perhaps he would still have been alive now.
Perhaps everything would have been different.
‘Don’t let these Fröntlers scare you. They’ll never get a majority here.’
‘Maybe. But sometimes I’m not sure if this is really still our country.’
In her shop Désirée always got to hear everything that happened. She learned of the children who had been shouted at in the street, ‘Jewboy, Jewboy, your time is nearly through, boy!’ although the worst thing wasn’t the mocking verse, but the fact that no one was bothered about it, she heard about the German refugee who was congratulated in a shop, because his Jewishness wasn’t visible, on the way his country was finally cleaning up and putting things in order, the story of the lawyer who argued in court that the slogan ‘Perish the Jews!’ on the wall of the Bern synagogue had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but was an expression of political opinion protected by the constitution, and who was able to back it up with reference to a judgement by the Swiss Federal Court.
‘And have you heard what happened in François’s department store?’
No, Arthur hadn’t heard.
Someone had taken a dislike to the trademark with which François had decorated each of his shop windows for years. This someone, whom the police could not identify, had taken offence at the horizontal and vertical name M-E-I-E-R and corrected it back to its original form, carefully adding the missing J, window by window, back in with oil paint.
Meijer without a yud had become Meier with a yud again.