The only family members missing were the ones from Halberstadt. It was possible that Ruben didn’t yet know anything about his grandmother’s death: for some reason the telephone call they had booked immediately had still not come through. They had now sent him a telegram, but so far he hadn’t replied.
They were all really mourning, which isn’t necessarily the case at funerals, for Chanele, although not for the Chanele of the last few years. With her death, she had become once again in all their minds what she had once been.
If one is unused to crying, it can easily tear one’s face apart. Hinda was born to laugh and didn’t know how to deal with tears. She wore her pain like a disguise, as if she had bought it quickly without spending very long choosing it, as she had done with the hat with the little black veil.
Zalman listened to the rabbi’s hesped with a critical expression. Sometimes, when the speaker got unnecessarily lost in commonplaces — ‘Eyshes chayil, loving wife, exemplary mother’ — without being aware of it, he shook his head disapprovingly and seemed to be preparing the arguments for a contradiction. He had always been particularly close to his mother-in-law; Chanele had been his ally from that first evening, when — ‘If it’s not negotiable!’ — she had forced him to make a formal proposal to Hinda.
Lea, who was standing beside her father, went on tugging nervously at her coat or straightening her hat. Something didn’t seem to be quite right, because the people, particularly the ones from Baden, were staring at her and whispering. She could even feel the glances on her back, like the touch of tiny fingers. She should have taken more care with her clothes: the old people of Baden, most of whom had previously known the Kamionker twins by name at best, now agreed how much Lea, with her eyebrows that met in the middle, looked like her grandmother, may her memory be blessed. You had to imagine her without the glasses — Chanele had never worn them, even when she was very old — but then it was, God preserve her, the spit, the very same punim.
Lea’s husband would have liked to give the whisperers a good telling-off, as he would have done at school. But Adolf Rosenthal had no say here. If you’ve only married into a family, at levayas you’re inevitably a marginal figure, a role that didn’t suit him at all. He stood stiffly among the others, almost insulted, and had to confirm his authority by digging his son in the ribs a number of times to make him stand up straight.
Hillel was wearing his old Shabbos suit, and didn’t feel at all comfortable in it. During his time at the Strickhof he had developed new muscles, so that the fabric bulged all over him. He felt as if with this disguise people were trying to force him back into a role that he had outgrown once and for all. He felt like Böhni in it. Still, he had successfully resisted the peaked cap that his father had tried to force on him, and instead insisted on the little embroidered kippah that identified him as a Zionist.
Rachel wore a dark grey suit from the winter collection of the Kamionker Clothes Factory. Her hat was too elegant for a funeral, but should one really wear an ugly one only so one didn’t put people’s noses out of joint? Her clothes were, however, subject to fewer comments than her red hair: it was generally agreed that this colour was entirely unsuitable for a sad occasion. At the same time her hairdo wasn’t a sheitel that could be donned or doffed as the situation required.
She had brought along her fiancé, an artiste or a circus man, one heard. (‘A fiancé? At her age?’ — ‘Well, of course a nice fat dowry takes years off a bride. Zalman Kamionker’s clothes factory is supposed to be booming.’) During the whole ceremony Herr Grün stood there as motionlessly as he had stood by Rachel’s desk on his very first day: someone who had learned to wait as other people learn a profession.
Every time Arthur visited his mother in the old people’s home, she had asked him, ‘Why didn’t you bring your children?’ Today, the day of her funeral, he was finally able to fulfil her wish.
His new family set a lot of tongues wagging. The filing cabinet in which public opinion organises its objects has its drawers, and his had always been quite clearly and emphatically marked ‘bachelor’. Even though he was a doctor and from a good family, all attempts to make a shidduch for him had long since been abandoned, and here he was all of a sudden turning up with this wife from Germany. As if the mothers hereabouts didn’t have beautiful daughters too. And besides, she was too young for him, far too young. Such things seldom turned out well, there were plenty of examples of that. Admittedly she looked quite nice, not at all dolled up, and yet it remained to be seen how she would fit in here. The children seemed to be well brought up, only the girl was cross-eyed and the little boy was anxious. In fact, Moses held tightly on to Arthur’s hand all the time; according to local custom only the men here went right up to the grave, and he was so keen to be a man.
The only one about whom no objections were raised was Désirée. Funerals suited her, and she suited funerals.
Eventually what had to be said had been said, the prayers and the eulogies. Nothing makes a person a tsadik as quickly as the fact of his death.
They set off for the last mitzvah that could be done for Chanele. The leaves had been falling from the trees for days, and under their carpet it was hard to tell where the paths ended and the graves began. Arthur tried to think of the reliable, protecting, ever-busy mother that he had known, not of the white, shrouded body that lay there in a wooden box with clay shards over its eyes, a bag of soil from the Holy Land as a pillow.
They drilled holes into the coffin, François had whispered to him at Uncle Salomon’s funeral, so that the worms could get at the corpse more quickly.
Someone — it later turned out to have been the over-eager Frau Olchev — had seen to it that the double gravestone was cleaned and freed of moss. The free half now looked indecently empty, as if people had been waiting impatiently for it to be filled out correctly like a blank form.
Janki and Chanele.
Jean Meijer and Hanna Meijer.
No maiden name, as would normally have been the case for a wife. Chanele had never known her parents.
Even though weeping constricted his throat like a tie knotted too tightly, Arthur spoke the kaddish for his mother in a firm voice. As before, at his bar mitzvah, he didn’t make a single mistake from the first word to the last.
Chanele could be proud of him.
One after the other they threw a handful of earth on the coffin, but they didn’t even succeed in hiding its lid. The official gravediggers with their shovels waited in the background and tried out of politeness to look as if they were especially affected by this particular death.
The bereaved passed through the lines of mourners and let the murmur of the mandatory words float over them. ‘May God console you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.’ It did them good for a moment, but it wasn’t real consolation, just as a brief shower on a hot day isn’t really cooling.
Then it was over, and they were all able to get into their cars again and drive back to Zurich. Why should they hold the shiva in Lengnau, which their mother had only ever visited during all those years? They would sit down together with Zalman and Hinda, under the Shabbos lamp that Chanele had polished so often as a young girl in Endingen.