When Adolf Rosenthal walked past the Cantonal school — he was retired now, and had had to give up his authority along with the key to the staff room — when he just happened to walk past it, as he just happened to do every day, when he then looked up to his old classroom, where no one had been allowed to interrupt him, Uncle Melnitz was standing at the window, waving at him and calling, ‘You’re late! My class has already started.’
They had a lot to learn from him, and this time they had to listen to him.
He had been right.
As he was right every time.
Came back and reported.
Telling stories made him vivid. He had brought new stories with him, lots of new stories, each one so fatally vivid that the others paled in comparison. In the modern age everything gets bigger and better and more efficient. Six million new stories, a fat book from which you could read for a generation without repeating yourself a single time. Stories that could not be believed, certainly not here in Switzerland, where they had lived all those years on an island, on dry land in the middle of a deluge. Stories that wouldn’t go into people’s heads, not here, where supplies had never run out. Here you had lit your fire to cook and not noticed that you were doing it on the back of a huge fish that only had to roll over once in the water or beat its fins and you would be crushed and suffocated and drowned straight away. They hadn’t known it, here in Switzerland. They were finding it out now, and would have been happier if they never had.
He told and told and told his tales and had been buried so often that it almost bored him to think of it.
These were no heroic tales that he had brought. Not the kind that one knew in this country.
Hillel, for example, had stood at the border, for five whole years. He had defended his fatherland with his rifle in his hand and would one day defend another fatherland. No one had yet found the knife to cut it from the map. Hillel had been a hero in active service, or had at least been granted permission by the state to remember heroism, to hang it on the wall in a frame: a dark green soldier staring into the distance, as unbowed and alert as a shomer in a different picture. Uncle Melnitz liked to stand before it, twist his head to study the signature of General Guisan, and say to Hillel, ‘Don’t forget to keep your rifle clean.’
Melnitz loved Switzerland. Even those who fear war like to play with tin soldiers. He loved this country, in which you could complain of hunger when chocolate was in short supply. It was interesting to visit Noah’s Ark after its thousand-year voyage.
In the watch shops on Bahnhofstrasse he made the hands stop. ‘Nothing changes here,’ he said. ‘Why would time need to change?’ On Bürkliplatz he walked from market stall to market stall and asked the farmers for rotten fruit and potato peelings. ‘I’ve got used to it,’ he said. ‘Why should I lose the habit?’ In François’s department store he stood in all the window displays, always behind the company emblem that decorated every pane, stood in such a way that the sun cast the shadow of the company insignia on his chest, where the circle in which the letters MEIER intersected sat over his heart like the bull’seye of a target. ‘Doesn’t it suit me?’ he asked.
Meijer with or without a yud.
He kept François company in his office, pushed the photographs of Mina and Alfred aside and sat down on the desk. With a small, modest gesture that was supposed to mean, ‘Don’t be distracted!’ Watched François as he checked accounts and added up columns of numbers, only nodded appreciatively from time to time and said, ‘A fine result. You’ve really achieved something.’
He loved the ringing of the tills and the cold solemnity of the strong rooms. He scratched secret signs into the gold bars, knew their origins and made them recognisable. When the shutters rattled down over the riches at night, he let himself be locked in, studied the neat columns of figures in the books and couldn’t stop laughing.
In the darkness he often went walking arm in arm with Herr Grün. They got on very well. They silently recited old texts — ‘Guten Tag, Herr Grün!’, ‘Guten Tag, Herr Blau!’ — or marched in uniform boots down the narrow alleys of the old town and startled the people with the songs in their heads.
He lived in the cemeteries, in the Steinkluppe, in the Binz, in the Friesenberg, and scratched the numbers of the years into the stones with his fingernails. ‘It was yesterday,’ he said, ‘Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday.’
Every time he died, he came back.
At every funeral he spoke the kaddish, and at every wedding he crushed the glass, at every bris he held the child on his lap and at every bar mitzvah he was the first to fill the cup. ‘L’chaim!’ he cried, ‘To life!’ Where three spoke the table prayer, he was the fourth, where ten met for the minyan he was there as the eleventh. When they danced with the Torah roll, once a year, he was the first dancer and the last, and when fasting was done, he rubbed his belly and said, ‘You call that going hungry? That’s nothing.’
Every time he died, he came back.
He also visited Désirée, in her shop, where people met to get hold of kosher butter, kosher biscuits and kosher gossip. He brought her bonbons, old-fashioned bonbons that smelled of almonds and rosewater, they played games with them on the counter, and the winner was allowed to stop remembering for a whole night.
He knew all the secrets and revealed them even to those who didn’t want to know.
He looked in on Arthur and Rosa, who had become a happily married couple without having been a real one. They now lived on Morgartenstrasse, in the big flat that had once belonged to Mimi and Pinchas and after that to Désirée, and when they sat in the evening as married couples do, Uncle Melnitz sat between them, put one arm around Arthur and one around Rosa and became a part of it.
The children weren’t children any more, certainly not Irma, who turned the heads of all the young men in the community with her distinctive squint, but Uncle Melnitz still knelt by their beds and whispered fairy-tales to them all night, stories in which bad things happened until everyone called for Goliath. But Goliath didn’t come. Then, when they woke up screaming, he moved on, bolstering himself with a deep swig from the locked crystal bottle in the Tantalus. He could drink from it without opening it; he had learned so much in his life.
Every time he died, he came back.
He didn’t come alone. This time he had brought reinforcements. One on his own can’t tell so many stories.
The whole city was full of them.
The whole country.
The whole world.
They live in attics, in ocean-crossing chests that had missed setting off in time. They hid in the cellars, under piles of rags that had once been festive costumes. They met in every corner. They sat in the empty Gotthard mail coach outside the National Museum, they travelled without horses to the end of the world. In the station they chalked numbers on the freight wagons. In the junk shop on Neugasse they looked for objects that had once belonged to them, and didn’t want them when they found them. At Sprüngli they scraped cream cakes from tin plates. On the terrace of the meat market they lined up as if on parade; only sometimes one of them jumped into the Limmat and was allowed to drown.
They were everywhere.
They sat in all the trees, a swarm of black birds, playing chess with each other. Melnitz had carved the pieces out of bones; he could name the origins of every beaten peasant, his country and his family. He knew everything and wouldn’t let anyone forget it.
‘Enjoy your lives,’ he said. ‘You’ve been lucky, here in Switzerland.’
Every time he died, he came back.