‘Who is that?’ she asked tonelessly.
‘My niece,’ answered Mimi. ‘Madame Rosa knows.’
‘She mentioned nothing to me.’ The gaunt woman seemed at first not to want to let them through, but then finally stepped aside. ‘You’re late,’ she hissed reproachfully.
A smell of cabbage soup hung in the corridor too, mixed with a sickly, penetrating smell that Hinda couldn’t identify. In big plates, ordinary soup plates, arranged on the floor along the walls, candles flickered, sooty smoke rising from their wicks.
Hinda coughed. The woman in grey walking in front of her turned to her and cast her a reproachful look. Then she opened the door to a room whose windows, in the middle of the afternoon, were covered with heavy velvet curtains.
Five or six people, Hinda couldn’t tell straight away in the half-darkness, sat around a circular table. The room was tiny, even smaller than the maid’s room under the roof in Baden. Four people had to get up and push their way into the corner of the room and the window niche so that Mimi could sit down. As they did so, the curtain was pushed aside for a moment, bright sunlight flashed in and lit an unframed oil painting, hanging on an unpapered wall, depicting a fogbound crevasse.
Hinda, always ready for an adventure in spite of her irritation, wanted to follow Mimi, but someone held her back. The gaunt woman had grabbed her parasol and didn’t seem to want to let go of it. It was only when she saw that the woman also had Mimi’s parasol hanging over her arm that Hinda realised she was trying to take it away from her. She pushed her way along the edge of the table to her seat, and all the others sat down again with much scraping of chairs. No one said a word.
Hinda was horrified to feel something touching her legs; but it was only the worn, dark brown table-cloth that reached to the floor. On her left sat Mimi, on her right an asthmatic-sounding, heavily breathing woman who smelled unhealthily of sweat. They had both rested their hands on the tablecloth with their fingers spread. Hinda looked around and established that everyone else had assumed the same posture, so that their little fingers touched and the whole thing formed a kind of chain. Hinda joined them; it seemed to be expected of her. The strange woman’s finger was cold and damp.
For almost a minute nothing happened. Then the gaunt woman, the only one to have stayed standing, said, ‘Let us close our eyes.’ Although she was still whispering, the sound of her voice reminded Hinda of a strict governess.
She obediently lowered her eyelids, but only half. When the kauhanim appeared before the congregation for the priest’s blessing in the prayer room, looking was also forbidden, and there was even a rumour among the younger children that a stolen glance could make you blind. Arthur, fearful as he was, had always obeyed the prohibition, but Hinda had once been unable to resist the temptation. Nothing bad had happened to her, but neither had she seen anything exciting. Only Mosbacher the businessman with his son and old Herr Katz, all three with arms outstretched, tallises pulled over their heads.
What she saw now around the table from beneath her lowered lids was even less exciting than that.
With one exception, all the people gathered around the table were women. The only man was sitting right next to Mimi, an elderly man with a narrow white beard, whom one might have imagined as an academic, or perhaps a grocer who liked to pick up a book in his free time. The woman beside him wore glasses with very small lenses, which sank into the fatty wrinkles of her round face like raisins in fresh dough. Her eyes were so tightly shut that she looked like a bawling baby. Then came a younger lady with an arrogant expression; one had a sense that she had only closed her eyes so that at least she didn’t have to look at the unworthy society in which she found herself against her will.
Next, diagonally opposite Hinda, sat a small, cosy woman, who looked a bit like the wife of Pfister, the baker on the Church Square, who not only sold the best Spanish rolls, but who was also first with the latest gossip. She was the only one of the ladies who was not wearing a hat, but had instead hidden her hair under a colourful turban, with an enamelled medallion resplendent on the front. That, of course, was Madame Rosa.
Next to her was a women entirely in black, with a half-length widow’s veil pinned to her hat, covering her eyes, and then came the woman who was having difficulty breathing. To look at her more closely, Hinda would have had to turn rudely and look at her.
‘Is there a good spirit there, who wants to speak to us?’ asked the woman with the turban. She said it in the coarse dialect of a suburban village, and as unceremoniously as someone asking if the post has arrived. Hinda, with her gift for seeing the ludicrous side of everything, had to struggle not to explode with laughter.
‘I ask again: is there a good spirit there, who wants to speak to us?’
Even afterwards, Hinda couldn’t explain what happened next. The table seemed to move under their hands, seemed to rise in the air and fall again, like someone turning in their sleep and then coming to rest again a moment later. There was a clearly audible knock as the foot of the table touched the floor again.
‘We greet you,’ said Madame Rosa, and all those present repeated: ‘We greet you.’
‘What is your name?’ asked Madame Rosa.
As in shul, when the moment has come, the people around the table began to murmur. Hinda thought for a moment that it was a prayer, but then she understood the strange sounds.
A B C D E F G
In a muttered chorus they recited the alphabet.
H I J K L M
Like little children at school.
N O P Q R
A knock.
‘R,’ said Madame Rosa.
The speaking chorus started again.
A B C D E F G
This time the knocking came after the O.
And then after the D.
And again after the O.
R. O. D. O. L. P. H. E.
‘Rodolphe,’ said Madame Rosa. A particularly violent knock confirmed the name.
Next to Hinda, Aunt Mimi started sniffing.
‘It’s him,’ she managed to speak between her tears. ‘I would have called him Rodolphe if he… if he…’
An impatient knocking interrupted her. Under Hinda’s hands the table was bucking like a restive horse.
‘Do you want to say something to us?’ asked Madame Rosa.
Knocking.
And the murmuring began again from the start. ABCDE.
M. the table spelt this time. M. A. M. A.
‘He’s talking to me,’ sobbed Mimi.
There was still a smell of of cabbage soup.
Afterwards, when they were sitting in the Palm Garden, Mimi admitted that while she didn’t believe in any of it, of course, there was without a doubt a lot of hocus pocus involved and she felt a little bit ridiculous, but on the other hand how could the table, or how could somebody, if there was deception involved, how could they have known the name Rodolphe, not just Rudolf, as people spelt and pronounced it hereabouts, but Rodolphe, in French, such an unusual name, how could anyone have known? And even if — she could see that Hinda was laughing again, she didn’t even need to hide it and perhaps she was right — and even if it was all a lot of theatre, a show put on for the credulous, it had done her good, so much good that Hinda couldn’t begin to imagine. Anyone who has not known true sorrow, Mimi said, anyone who does not know proper tsuris, cannot understand, but if someone has been through as much as she has, one clutches at straws. And what the voice had said — for her it was a voice, even if all you actually heard, of course, was the knocking noises that Madame Rosa then had to interpret — what the voice had said had been so correct, so clearly and unambiguously meant only for her, that he was well, that he was happy and that he loved her, ah, Hinda had no idea what that meant for a mother who had never been able to pick up her child or bentsh it on a Friday evening. Rodolphe was the name she wanted to give him, after a book that someone had once read aloud to her, it was so long ago that she sometimes thought she’d only dreamt it all.