Arthur, the late-comer, loved his uncle Salomon, because he treated him like an adult. ‘You will soon have your bar mitzvah,’ Salomon had declared. ‘Thirteen years old, and thirteen is the numerical value of the word Echod. What does Echod mean? Echod mi yodea? Nu? Didn’t you pay attention in cheder?’
‘Echod means one.’
‘Correct! And what does thirteen have to do with one? Very simple: when you are thirteen years old, you are no longer just a part of your family, you are a human being in your own right. An individual. A man. And I’m not supposed to talk to you seriously?’
If one has always been the youngest, always the one who understands the least, there is nothing more valuable than a person who gives you the feeling of being on an equal footing with you. Not that Arthur was jealous of his older siblings, that was not part of his character. He had a low opinion of himself, he knew that he would never smile as elegantly as Shmul or glow from within as Hinda did. He wasn’t even dainty, which would have been the natural role of the baby of the family. Arthur was an angular child, he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin and lost himself time and again in thoughts too complicated for his incomplete intelligence. He was often deemed to be precocious, but that wasn’t right. Arthur was younger than his years, and that can be very painful.
Shmul, on the other hand, or actually François… The very fact that his brother had two different names profoundly impressed Arthur. He too would have liked a second personality that he could slip into, and sometimes at night when the leaves of the plane trees cast threatening lunar shadows on the wall of his room, he imagined himself as a Siegfried or a Hector, a broad-shouldered, fair-haired boy who could run faster than everyone else and throw a ball without his fellow pupils shouting ‘Butterfingers! Butterfingers!’
If their eldest had two names, it was down to the fact that during the first week of his life, the eight days until the bris, Janki and Chanele had not, as so often, been of the same opinion. Janki argued for François, after his revered Maître Delormes, while Chanele, who had never known her own parents, insisted that the child should be called after Janki’s late father, Shmul, because it’s only if someone goes on bearing a name that the dead remain alive. And anyway, who had ever heard of a Jewish boy being named after a goyish tailor?
They never agreed on what the boy was to be called, but neither did they argue about it, as they seldom argued, each one instead imposing his or her own will, as if they had two different firstborn sons, Janki a François and Chanele a Shmul.
Shmul-François or François-Shmul learned early on to be one thing for one and another for the other, and to derive from this whatever he wanted. When he started talking, as he did very late, he talked about himself in a nameless third person, saying ‘He’s hungry’ or ‘He doesn’t want to go to sleep,’ and tacked as skilfully back and forth between his parents as if being a child had been merely a part he played, and the tousled head of curls no more than a theatrical wig. When his hair, in line with custom, was cut for the first time on his third birthday, it seemed to Chanele as if an entirely alien person were coming to light, someone she didn’t know, and of whom she was strangely afraid.
By now François was twenty-one, he smoked Russian cigarettes in an almost authentic amber holder and had a moustache that he rubbed with wax every week. He also subjected his hair to strict discipline, using a pomade that he bought from the barber in colourful tins. The picture on the lid showed an Indian maharaja next to an English officer, and when the tins were empty, Arthur was given them for all the things he collected: stamps, of course, all schoolboys do that, but also the portraits of foreign races that came with certain cigarette packs, and optical illusions that seemed to change when you looked at them for some time.
Hinda also supported Arthur’s mania for collecting things. It had been her who had given him his most precious possession: a ticket d’entrée with a picture of a Greek god listening interestedly but languidly to a muse. Janki had brought it for her, for her of course, as a souvenir of his first trip as a buyer to Paris, it was his ticket to the world’s fair, where he had seen real-life savages and all of Thomas Edison’s four hundred and ninety-three inventions. For his bar mitzvah, Arthur’s dearest wish was for a microscope, because he too would have liked to be an inventor, and he was grateful to his sister for not laughing at him when he talked about it.
Hinda had slipped out of Chanele almost without causing her any pain. That was actually impossible, the midwife said, but she could have sworn that the child had, when it was barely born, smiled open-eyed into the light, and children seldom smile so early. At the holekrash, the naming ceremony for girls, Hinda allowed herself to be lifted up and carried around without crying once. Golde, Salomon told the story often, had kept wiping her eyes dry throughout the whole sude, while repeating the words, ‘Like a princess!’ Mimi, beside her, had drawn circles on her temples with her fingertips, because the happiness of other mothers always gave her a migraine.
Later, when Hinda was older, she wasn’t afraid of anything, not even spiders. When her father fancied a particular bottle of wine she went to the cellar all by herself, just with a candle, and saw nothing of the ghosts that danced on the walls. Arthur admired her a lot for that. And even Janki, who normally saved the big words up for particularly good customers, admitted it: Hinda was a ray of sunshine.
Janki didn’t have much time for Arthur; the business devoured him. When Arthur heard that phrase for the first time, when he was still a little boy, he had been terrified, and had clung weeping to his father until Janki shook him off and said to Chanele: ‘You mollycoddle that boy.’
‘Sometimes,’ Arthur said to Uncle Salomon, and it was something that he had never confided in a single soul, ‘sometimes I would rather be a girl.’
‘Interesting,’ Salomon said. He had crumbled a piece of cake into his coffee and was stirring the mixture around slowly, with great concentration. With each rotation the spoon hit the edge of the cup with a melodic chink. In the background Christine, the cook, provide a basso continuo on a chopping board full of onions. ‘Very interesting. A girl. Why?’
‘I don’t know, it’s stupid.’
‘Nothing you think is stupid. Only not thinking at all is stupid.’ Since Salomon had been preoccupied with gematria, he had become used to speaking in sentences.
‘But it isn’t really possible.’
‘So?’ Salomon waved his hand dismissively, and so violently that his coffee spoon skittered across the table top. ‘What does possibility have to do with anything? Every day I dream that Golde is alive again.’ The spoon had left a trail of coffee behind, and with his finger Salomon drew a snaking line in it. ‘Why would you like to be a girl? Nu?’
‘I don’t know. It’s… I think they have it easier.’
‘Christine!’
The basso continuo broke off. ‘Yes, Herr Meijer?’
‘Do women have it easier than men?’
When Christine laughed, and she had a roaring, masculine laugh, she always kept a hand in front of her mouth, like a boxer feeling for a tooth that’s just been knocked out. When she had a carp to kill for Shabbos, she didn’t hit it on the head with a tenderising hammer, but stuck her wide thumb in its mouth and broke its neck with a jerk.
‘You’re a funny one, Herr Meijer,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘We women do all the work.’
‘That might be an argument against your thesis,’ said Uncle Salomon. Arthur was flattered that he used such adult words.
‘But girls don’t need to have bar mitzvahs!’