Now Salomon Meijer and Naftali Pomeranz were leading Janki to his kalleh. He was probably making a very pious face as they did, supporting himself heavily on his walking stick and dragging his right leg, the fraud.
They sang and prayed, and then the vague noise ebbed away and Mimi heard — she didn’t really hear it, but she heard it all the same — Rav Bodenheimer uttering the marriage blessing to the chassen, and the chassen repeating every word individually. ‘Herewith,’ said Janki, ‘you are made sacred to me, by the laws of Moses and Israel.’
It had been exactly as cold back then, as ice cold as it was in this bare room, back then when he had stood outside the house in his uniform, a pirate or an explorer, with his fake bandage and his fake eyes. She granted him to Chanele, she really granted him to her, and for that reason she smiled at the dead prayer books, with a majestic smile, and made a dismissive movement of her hand, just as Elizabeth did in the book, when she said, ‘Cut her head off, but do it with respect, she is a queen like me.’
And then — the sudden noise surprised her, because she hadn’t been thinking of that other marriage any more, and why should she have? — then the people in the synagogue were all making a great hubbub, ‘Mazel tov!’ they cried, and that meant that Janki had stamped on the glass that was stamped on at every marriage in memory of the destruction of the temple, that the ceremony was over or nearly over, that Janki and Chanele were a couple, a couple for the rest of their lives, according to the law of Moses and Israel.
It was really very cold.
‘Have you been crying?’ asked Golde when she came to collect Mimi.
‘Why should I cry?’ asked Mimi.
She allowed herself to be led between Golde and Sarah Pomeranz to the canopy. ‘We must look ridiculous,’ she thought, ‘Sarah so long and thin and my mother so small.’
The people smiled at her, and she kept her head quite straight, like a queen.
When she stepped under the chuppah, something crunched under her shoe. It was a splinter of the glass that Janki had broken.
1893
15
Uncle Salomon never told anyone in advance when he was coming to Baden. Janki had often enough offered to send him a coachman, whenever he liked; as long as the information was received in time, a coach could be easily organised; after all, they delivered far into the Canton. But Salomon didn’t want to be pinned down. ‘All my life I’ve gone my own way,’ he said in that cantankerous way he had, ‘and now I’m supposed to know in advance when I’m where?’
The truth was that Salomon had become peculiar since Golde’s death. Even Chanele had to admit that. Sometimes he locked himself up in the house for days at a time, no one knew if he was even eating anything, and when people dropped by to check on him, he wouldn’t open the door. And it was quite a trek from Baden to Endingen, even if you drove it could easily take half a day, which was lost to the shop. And what about him? He left you standing in the street, you had to knock and shout, and once he calmed down and unbolted the door he refused to be disturbed, he had to work, he was on the track of major discoveries and under no circumstances could he interrupt his calculations. It was no longer the register of Simmental cattle that so intensely preoccupied him; he had completely abandoned the beheimes trade. Salomon’s new passion — ‘It’s already more than an illness,’ Janki said — was gematria, a Cabbalistic method of performing complicated calculations with the numerical value of Hebrew letters, to read hidden connections out of agreements and differences. Here too, Salomon was very much the cattle trader: he had practised juggling with numbers in a thousand cattle trades, and when he succeeded in wrestling a new meaning from a word with great computational skill, he was as happy as if he had purchased a cow at a knock-down price.
‘My own name,’ he would pontificate by way of example, Salomon, Shlomo, has a numerical value of three hundred and seventy five. Golde had a numerical value of forty-eight. Take forty-eight away from three hundred and seventy five — and what do you have left? Three hundred and twenty seven. And which word in the Torah has a numerical value of three hundred and twenty seven? Ho-arboyim, evening twilight. What is that trying to tell us? Since the Lord took my Golde away, evening has fallen in my life. All I have left is waiting for the night, for death.’ When he said such things, he wasn’t sad or anything, he smiled quite cheerfully as he spoke, as if providing an explanation and being right were consolation enough for him.
Golde had died quite suddenly, her death caused to some extent by motion. She had gone to Zurich, to see Mimi who — me neshuma! — had been through some difficult times, and who had found herself terribly out of her depth, had spent two days instilling the fear of God into that slut of a servant girl, had then got back onto the train to be at home in time for Shabbos preparations at home, and had just sat there, hadn’t got out in Baden, or in Turgi, or in Brugg, and when the man who cleaned the carriages there poked her with his finger to wake her up, she had simply toppled sideways, ‘like a bag of flour’, the man said. When the chevra came to fetch the corpse, it was lying in the luggage store room. The right hand, which could no longer be opened easily, was still clutching a bag. In it was a large piece of smoked meat, the speciality of Pinchas’s butcher’s shop in Zurich.
Even in the cemetery, halfway between Endingen and Lengnau, Salomon had maintained his composure, and at the shiva, too, no one had noticed anything but the normal grief of a widower. It was only when Janki asked him, quite quietly and reasonably, on the last day of the week of mourning, whether he mightn’t think of dissolving the household in Endingen and moving in with them in Baden, after all, there was plenty of room in the big flat, there was a sewing room that was never used, that Salomon had started shouting, all of a sudden and in a way that was most unlike him. They were to leave him alone, he had shouted, he wanted to stay with Golde, and apart from that he needed nothing and nobody.
Now he sat day after day over his calculations, visited by nobody but the shnorrers who buzzed around the double house in Endingen like bees around a particularly luxurious shrub. From Bialystok to Mir the address had been discussed as a place where you didn’t first have to laboriously reel out your tales of woe about sick parents and starving children, where all you had to do was listen to the Cabbalistic ravings of the master of the house for an hour or two, stroke your beard and nod, before moving on amply piled with food and gifts. Janki repeatedly complained about this pointless waste of money, even though, as he stressed, it didn’t affect him personally, because while his wife Chanele might have grown up in Salomon’s house, nothing would come to her after his death.
Sometimes Salomon would take his umbrella at dawn and then walk the old paths for hours, to Zurzach, for example, on a day when there was no market there, or to the farming villages where he had once done his deals. There, as people were already saying all over the place, to Janki’s irritation and Chanele’s concern, he would enter some byre or other without a word of explanation, leave it just as silently, frighten the maids and be laughed at by the labourers, stayed whole nights away and was then, if anyone rebuked him for it, suddenly the old Salomon again, thoughtful and humorous.
‘Of course I would rather come and see you unannounced,’ he once said, ‘ideally in the afternoon, when I can be sure that Janki is in his fabric storeroom and Chanele in the other shop. Then I can sit down in the kitchen, fat Christine makes me coffee, a piece of bread or cake is found and I can talk at my leisure to my friend Arthur.’