He inhaled the new air, searchingly at first, like something strange and forgotten that you first have to remember, then greedily, in quick, impatient gulps. His lung rattled, a long unused machine. He said ‘Ah!’ as if after the first cooling draught of water on a hot day, opened his eyes, looked round and recognised them all. Had never forgotten them. They avoided his gaze, and he noticed it and smiled. ‘This is my shiva,’ this smile said. ‘They’re mourning for me here. My own shiva, from which no one will drive me. I am Uncle Melnitz, who got his name from Khmelnitsky.’
Uncle Melnitz.
He cleared his throat and coughed, blew black stains into a handkerchief the side of a map, big enough for a list of all the countries in which he had experienced death. A white flag like that waved by someone surrendering.
He smelled of damp, of must, of memories. He brought alive the scent of distant lands, just as Janki’s first shop had held the scent of cardamom and nutmeg. But he brought no spices to them; he came from cold countries and carried with him only smells that choked the throat.
When one of them edged away he didn’t edge after them, he just sat where he was and waved after the departing one. He was already waiting for him at the next place, he had made himself comfortable at a table or in his favourite armchair under the lamp. Or else he lay in his bed, in a long white shirt that wasn’t a nightshirt.
He sat opposite them when they read their newspaper at the breakfast table, and when they gave a start as they read and said, ‘We didn’t know that’ — they said it every day and every day they gave a start again — when they didn’t finish reading and set the paper aside and didn’t want to know anything more about everything because they couldn’t bear the knowledge, then he patted their hands comfortingly and said, ‘You should have asked me. You should just have asked me.’
They hadn’t asked him because they were afraid of his answers.
He had never been away and now he was everywhere.
He sat on all the benches along the lake shore, he stared into the sun with his eyes wide open, for days, and yet his skin stayed pale as if he had never emerged from the shadow of his hiding place. He ran after all the prams, he bent his back low again and again to peer in and every time he was disappointed. He begged for bread at every door, only to let it go hard and say, ‘My teeth have been knocked out.’ Where someone laughed loudly, he stood in the room and put his finger to his lips, a bony finger with which he could also drum on the table, making it sound like the precise rattle of a firing squad. From all the family trees he drew names at random, kept them in big baskets, unripe fruits from which he distilled a brandy that no one could drink without their eyes watering. He sat in all the libraries and scribbled notes in the margins of the books. He wrote with red ink, dipped the old-fashioned quill in his own veins and became paler and paler. If a couple kissed, he stood behind them, if they made love, he lay down with them, whispered in their ears tender words that didn’t belong to them, he knew a different story for each couple and another and another, and in none of them did they live happily ever after. He gave the children names, and every time he knew how to name a thousand other children who had had exactly the same name, and who had also fared badly. He scraped the putty from the windows so that the panes came loose and the wind whistled into the room. He ate the window putty, stuffed it greedily into his mouth and chewed it toothlessly. He had a crudely carved flute in his pocket, and he took it out, played infinitely sad tunes and demanded that everyone hum along. He told of far-away countries in which it had been cold, oh so cold. Walked close behind people and wrapped his bony arms around them to show them how one had tried in vain to warm oneself there. He sat at all the tables; his plate was empty, however much was ladled into it. He stuck the fork through his hand, and he scratched notches into the spoon, a new one every day. He smiled from all the mirrors, pale and patient, let his face seep into that of his beholder like an ineradicable colour, infected him with an incurable illness, became an inseparable part of him. Soon no one knew which part was him and which part was them.
Every time he died, he came back.
He belonged to the family.
He belonged to all families.
When they talked about Ruben — and when didn’t they speak about him? — he repeated the name like a spell, ‘Ruben, Ruben, Ruben’. Hinda and Zalman had grown old, older than their years, and still lived entirely on what once had been. They sat under the Shabbos lamp that no one lit now, because it couldn’t make their worries vanish, they sat there looking at the same photographs over and over again until he took them out of their hands and fanned them out on the games table like playing cards. He listed the tricks as they had been played, for twelve whole years. One game after another, and they hadn’t won a single one. He could tell them where Ruben had been collected and where he had been taken to, on what day and at which hour, where he had been first and where he had ended up after that, which way they had gone and on which transport. He told them where he had been seen and where he had eventually not been seen, told them what had happened to him before his trail had disappeared amid millions of other trails that Uncle Melnitz all knew as well, and whose stories he could all tell on long dark days and on long wakeful nights. He spoke calmly and without haste, like one who knows: I will never run out of stories.
So many stories.
He knew how to talk about Ruben’s wife, who had been a Sternberg from Berlin, and who everyone had only ever called Lieschen. Those two names were all that was left of her, Lieschen and Sternberg, everything else had been carried away by a cold wind, grey dust and flakes of ash. ‘Where it blows, the flowers grow better,’ he said. They couldn’t really remember their daughter-in-law, they had only ever visited her or been visited by her, and you don’t get to know people that way. Not the way you would like to know somebody. They couldn’t even have named her hair colour, the photographs were black and white, black and ivory, black and brown. Each time they took the album out, her face was less familiar to them. There was only one detail that they never forgot, the one small, unusual thing that everyone has left over if he’s lucky, the detail which is like a nail that you can hang things on, a picture or a memory. They’d called her Lieschen, a child’s name, even when she was long grown up, only ever Lieschen. Even her own children had got used to it; you remembered that even if you remembered nothing else about her. It had been four children, three boys and a girl; there was one photograph in which they would never grow older. Uncle Melnitz was the only one who could tell them apart, who still knew their names. The only one who had played with them, and now he wanted to teach the game to everyone else, you count down and clap your hands and sing, ‘Ei! Ei! Ei!’
Every time he died, he came back.
He was a stranger here in Zurich, and yet he was at home, just as he was at home in every place to which he had been exiled. At Sechsläuten he marched with the parade, in a costume that was older than everyone else’s, and stamped out the beat of the brass band music with dusty shoes. The bouquets thrown to the others dried in his hands, and he greeted and laughed and waved and was the guest of honour. In the Knabenschiessen shooting competition he stood in front of the targets and unbuttoned his red frock coat, waved to the riflemen not to keep him waiting. And he also liked to pick up the black wand and point it at the hits, on the chest, on the belly, on the forehead. At Schulsilvester, the tumultuous last day of school before the Christmas holidays, he went from house to house at dawn and roused the people from their beds with lots of noise. ‘They often came at this time of day,’ he said.