‘Are you even listening?’ Janki raised his hands dramatically to the heavens. It looked as if he was about to tear his hair out. ‘Thirteen! That means…’
‘I’ve just been explaining that to Arthur.’ Salomon now emerged from one of the many rooms into the corridor. ‘The gematria of thirteen…’
‘Leave me in peace with your gematria!’ yelled Janki.
Salomon made a calming gesture, which had proved itself with many an over-eager guard dog. ‘Nuuu!’ he said, and in this instance it meant: ‘Don’t get yourself worked up!’
‘I’m glad you’ve come to see us, Uncle,’ said Chanele. She still used the old, formal style of address with him. ‘Do you have everything you need?’
‘The shirt is too tight. You wouldn’t tie a rope around a calf’s neck as tight as that.’
‘It’s your size,’ said Janki. ‘I have an eye for it.’
‘But I don’t have the neck for it.’
‘Where is Shmul?’ asked Chanele.
‘François is in his room, I assume. He’ll be getting himself ready.’ His memory jogged, Janki grabbed his Lavallière and tugged the artful knot apart again in a gesture of desperation. ‘Thirteen guests!’ he wailed as plaintively as a cantor on Yom Kippur.
‘Let Arthur eat with us. Then it’ll be fourteen.’
‘Thirteen and a half,’ said Salomon and laughed.
Janki gave him an angry look. ‘Arthur doesn’t yet know how to behave in society.’
‘He will soon. His bar mitzvah is coming up.’
‘Why does Hinda have to be at Mimi’s in Zurich today of all days?’
At that moment Louisli came into the corridor, already wearing the white bonnet and starched apron that she was supposed to wear to serve at table, saw the master of the house standing bare-legged in front of her, pressed her hand to her mouth and fled into the kitchen.
No, Chanele really had no chance of talking to Shmul.
When he heard what was wanted of him, Arthur tried to creep away. Until now, when they had important guests, he had always been allowed to eat in the kitchen, where not every facial expression and every movement were of crucial importance, and when it was just the family he only had to listen to all the thousand admonishments, to keep his back straight, to hold his spoon with only two fingers, to wipe his mouth before he drank from a glass. An official dinner seemed to be as riddled with obstacles as the suit with all the little bells with which Oliver Twist was supposed to learn to steal. Back then, when he had read the book, Fagin had appeared to him in his dreams every night, and Fagin had had Janki’s face, the severe face that Papa made when he wanted to expose one of Arthur’s shortcomings. He was convinced, and in such matters his imagination knew no bounds, that he would make a fool of himself, would knock over his soup plate or break a glass, that they would look at him reproachfully, all those strange people, and then nod like Cantor Würzburger when Arthur stalled while practising a droosh. ‘We knew all the time,’ they would say.
Chanele needed to persuade her son, needed to promise him a flexed nib for his collection because Arthur also collected nibs, which he arranged according to changing systems, a naturalist looking through a pile of various shells or snails for hidden affinities. Then, when she tried to make him wear the good trousers that had fit without any problems at Pesach, they were too small, the bottoms ridiculously halfway up his calves, and Chanele had to decide to get his bar mitzvah suit — which had already been prepared but not of course worn — out of the cupboard and thus exacerbate Arthur’s anxiety still further. Any stain on that suit, he knew, would be a calamity that he would never live down for the rest of his life.
Then Louisli, who had been put in a flap by all the excitement in the house, had to be calmed down as well. The dining room had to be checked and instructions given for an altered seating plan. The big table was massive and imposing, and equipped with a modern mechanism that meant it could be extended to twice its length, ‘with only one hand’, as Janki proudly stressed. The table top — tropical wood! — was hidden under the white damask tablecloth, but one could very faintly catch the scent of the walnut oil with which it was regularly rubbed. When Arthur was even younger, Chanele had once caught him licking the top of the table with his tongue. ‘It’s an experiment,’ he had said.
The table groaned, as it was supposed to, with nouveau riche abundance. The Sarreguemines porcelain — they had enough for twenty people — paraded in a double column, the silver cutlery gleamed and the crystal glasses whose fragility Arthur so dreaded waited around for the lighting of the candles, like debutantes in sequined dresses waiting to display their full beauty. The wine bottles were lined up on the sideboard, a guard of honour for the silver tantalus, which still lacked a key.
In the kitchen Christine had everything under control. She said it with the gritted smile of a boxer who doesn’t want to show any weakness just before the victorious conclusion of a fight. The covered bowls and plates waited on the table like heavy artillery awaiting deployment in battle. Only one small gap was not occupied, just big enough for the two hired servants to act as food tasters for the party. They had hung their threadbare dinner jackets over the backs of the chairs and rolled up their sleeves, and when Madame Meijer came in they just lifted their bottoms an inch out of their chairs and greeted her with their mouths full.
And Chanele still couldn’t talk to Shmul. She was already on the way to his room, but Janki was already coming towards her and cried in a despairing voice, ‘You’re not even dressed.’
So she dressed herself up, decorated herself as she had decorated the table in the dining room. Arthur was allowed to button up her dress; that privilege had been part of Chanele’s promises, because Arthur loved nothing more than to be allowed to stand in his parents’ bedroom, which was otherwise forbidden to him, Marco Polo in an exotic palace, and carefully finger all the little hooks into their eyes. As he was short-sighted, his head almost touched his mother’s back, he was allowed to be quite close to her and inhale her very special scent of cleanliness, talcum powder and dependability, before he was dispatched to have his hair combed once more by Louisli.
Since Chanele thought vanity was only ever a waste of time, the rest of the preparations took a very short time; she put on her jewellery as one might hang a bunch of keys on a hook, and where her hair was concerned — well, there is one advantage to the Jewish tradition of wearing a sheiteclass="underline" you can put your new hairstyle on like a hat.
When she came into the drawing-room, the whole family was already there waiting. Janki looked very elegant in the full glory of an evening suit. He had pinned the Lavallière over his silver brocade waistcoat with an artful carelessness that must have taken a dozen tries. Shmul, whom she now had to spend an evening calling François, wore a velvet jacket that set off his narrow hips. The freshly waxed tips of his moustache stuck into the air like little knives, and he looked so elegant, in a bored way, that it was easy to imagine what young salesgirls found irresistible about him. Arthur, with a very unhappy face, waited beside his brother. Uncle Salomon had rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
‘Shmul,’ said Chanele, ‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Don’t worry, Mama, I will act quite convincingly as if I’m enjoying the evening.’
‘Frau Lutz came to see me today, Mathilde Lutz, and she told me…’
But the first guests were already being ushered in, and Chanele had to stop talking and put on her Mademoiselle-Hanna smile.
The first, as always were of course the accountant Ziltener and his wife. Ziltener, devoted to letters and numbers, had, in spite of all kinds of discreet hints, never been able to understand that etiquette required him to appear only ten minutes after the given time, ‘to give the wife of the house the opportunity to carry out the last preparations’, as it said in the books of manners. In his worn, dark suit and stiff collar he felt visibly ill at ease, and when he bent over his boss’s hand like a folding ruler, she could see how carefully he had combed his thin hair over his bald patch. A sweetish smell of curd soap and mothballs rose from the back of his neck.