At the bar mitzvah, the day when one becomes an adult in the middle of childhood, one has to deliver the sidra in the service, the Torah passage of the week, you have to learn it by heart, word for word and note for note, you have to stand up in front of the whole congregation as a singer, torture for someone who almost dies of embarrassment when he has, by way of punishment, to stand up in front of the class at school and recite Schiller’s ‘Veiled Image at Sais’, in a quivering voice, every single verse. And then, if your voice assumes a life of its own, if it suddenly, without any advance warning, starts squeaking or growling…
‘All our voices have broken,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘And we still survived our bar mitzvahs.’
‘Yes, fine,’ said Arthur, ‘but Shmul…’ Shmul, whose big day he could still remember — there had been a whole table of cakes and a drop of wine, very sweet and warm — Shmul had trilled like a little bird in the prayer room, and Janki had been very proud of him, but that was it, Shmul was Shmul and Arthur was Arthur, and in his case, he was sure of it, the whole dreadful disaster would come about, the one they whispered about in cheder behind their raised copies of the chumash, his voice would finally break, on that precise day, at that very minute, he wouldn’t be able to make a sound, not even a wrong one, he would just stand there and croak, and everyone would stare at him and shake their heads. Only Cantor Würzburger, with whom he had been studying this passage twice a week for months, would nod and say in his high, German voice, ‘I always knew the boy would make me look a fool.’
And then there was the address, as well, the droosh that one had to deliver at major feasts, the learned speech that the listeners knew better than the speaker did, because Cantor Würzburger, who also rehearsed this part of the ritual, had only three addresses in his repertoire, which he drilled into his bar mitzvah boys in turn. Arthur had been landed with the one about those commandments which are time-bound, and from which women are therefore exempt, and he was sure — how could it be otherwise? — that he would falter or dry up, he simply wouldn’t know how to go on, so that Chanele would lower her head, very slowly, as she did when she was really furious. And Janki would…
‘You left out shitting your pants during the droosh,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘That would be even worse, and it isn’t going to happen either. If bar mitzvahs were really as hard as you think, the Jewish people would have died out long ago.’
‘But…’ said Arthur.
‘You talk too much,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘In the old days, if someone had offered me a cow and gone on the way you’re doing, I wouldn’t have bought it.’ He licked his spoon clean, thoroughly and carefully, and then asked in a much quieter voice than before: ‘Tell me, dear boy, what it is that you really want to say. Why would you like to be a girl?’
Arthur blushed. That happened to him often, the heat simply rose up within him and there was nothing he could do about it. He cast an anxious glance at Christine, but she had disappeared behind her veil of steam and was stirring her soup-pot with the concentration of an alchemist.
‘My face is so ugly,’ Arthur, feeling his eyes growing moist. ‘If I had long hair, people wouldn’t see it as much.’
Uncle Salomon didn’t laugh at him. Neither did he say, ‘You aren’t ugly, mon joujou,’ as Aunt Mimi would have done. He said nothing at all, just rested his big, heavy cattle-trader hands on Arthur’s head and very slowly and searchingly felt its contours, ran one hand over the back of his head and the other over his nose, pinched his cheeks and tapped his teeth inquiringly with his fingernails. His fingers, with their rough tips, smelt reassuringly of snuff. In the end he wiped his hands on his frock coat, a gesture that he had acquired over many visits to cow-byres. Arthur waited for his judgement, like a seriously ill patient after a thorough examination, waiting for the diagnosis of the specialist.
‘Nu,’ said Uncle Salomon.
Arthur lowered his head. But two strong fingers gripped him under his chin and forced him to look up. Uncle Salomon puffed out his cheeks, lips closed. Where they weren’t covered by his white whiskers, his many burst veins looked like colourful hundreds and thousands sprinkled on a cake.
‘There is only one solution for your problem,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘You will have to grow a beard.’
Arthur stared at him
‘Not straight away, of course. Life has its rules. First come the pimples, then the beard. Shall I let you into a secret?’ He tugged around at his own beard until the yellowish white strands pointed in all directions. ‘I didn’t like my looks when I was a boy either. In my case it was my hair, which I lost far too early. They called me “the galekh”. But whether it’s your hair or your face — no one likes themselves. Apart from stupid people. They like themselves a lot. So.’ He rubbed his hands as if he were washing them without water. ‘Now your parents can come home. I’m hungry.’
‘But you won’t say anything to them. Please.’
‘About what?’
‘What I told you.’
‘You know,’ Uncle Salomon said, with a lot of wrinkles around his eyes, ‘I’m sometimes so lost in my own thoughts that I don’t even hear what’s being said to me. I’ve been working something out all the time. The difference between boys and girls. Are you interested in it?’ He picked up his spoon like a pointer and began to pontificate. ‘Son is ben, and has the numerical value of fifty-two. Daughter is bat — four hundred and two. A difference of three hundred and fifty. Does that mean that daughters are worth that much more than sons?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Arthur quietly.
‘Wrong. Three hundred and fifty is, in fact, the numerical value of the word pera. And what does pera mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Pera means long hair! Like that grown by someone who has made a vow.’ Salomon held the palm of his hand out to Arthur and made him shake hands as if concluding the purchase of a cow. ‘So a girl, we can see from the gematria, is nothing more than a boy who has decided to stop cutting his hair. But if you add two hundred and fifty and four hundred and two…’
‘What sort of maassehs are you telling the boy?’ A maasseh is just a story, but the way Janki pronounced the word, it meant more than that: a stupid story, a superfluous story, a story that wastes valuable time, time that a little boy would be better off using to do his homework or learn his bar mitzvah address, so that he didn’t make a fool of himself with it.
Janki hadn’t come all the way into the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway, with the face of a Sunday walker whose path has led him around the edge of a bog, and who fears for his clean shoes. His light grey coat was cut quite generously, the way artists in Paris liked them at the moment. He held his hat in his hand, along with the lion-headed walking stick.
‘Why don’t you tell me when you’re coming? So that we can at least send a carriage for you. What does it look like when you march down the main road on foot like a… like a…’
‘Like a beheimes dealer, you mean? Nu, there are worse things.’ Salomon rose from his chair and bent for the umbrella that had been lying at his foot the whole time like a faithful dog. His body looked smaller than before, bulky and less powerful. Golde’s death had given the whole man a good shake and let him collapse in on himself.
‘And why are you sitting in the kitchen and not in the drawing-room?’
‘Because of Christine, of course,’ said Salomon and winked at Arthur, as men do to one another. ‘I’ve never been able to resist beautiful women.’
The fat cook, embarrassed, laughed her gurgling boxer’s laugh.
‘You shouldn’t keep her from her work. Certainly not today, when we have guests.’