The heavy fabric moved. The head of the man they called Ahasuerus here, and who was her father, became visible, not up where it had disappeared into the curtain, but down on the floor. He must have knelt down and lain on the floor and was now crawling, lying on his back, into the room, he pushed himself away from the wall and lay motionless on the raw floorboards, his arms by his sides, his sightless eyes wide open.
‘They put them on the floor when they have died,’ explained the man in the tatty tailcoat. ‘They wash them, and they lay them down, and then they put them in the coffin.’
Chanele crouched down by her father, by this strange man. She would have liked to pray, but none of the many blessings that Judaism keeps ready for every possible event and opportunity suited the situation. At last she murmured what people say when news of a death arrives: ‘Praise be the judge of the truth.’ The old man didn’t stir, but she had a feeling he was content.
She closed her eyes and would have crouched for a long time like that beside the motionless man, if there hadn’t been a sudden smell of wet potatoes, a smacking kiss on her forehead and a voice saying, ‘Nothing more can happen to you now.’
Then Dr Hellstiedl was with her. Perhaps he had arrived at that precise moment, but probably he had been watching the whole thing from somewhere. They must have had observation windows up here, where not even a nurse was paying attention to anyone.
The doctor took her arm and led her silently out. It was only when he had opened the grille and closed it again that he said, ‘I have found the old index card after all. His name is Menachem Bär.’
Menachem.
Menachem and Sarah Bär.
And their daughter Chanele.
When they were walking across the courtyard that already lay in the shade of the brick building, he asked her, ‘Is that your father?’ She didn’t reply, and he didn’t press the point.
They walked down the long corridor where there were no names on the doors, through the corridor with the windows that weren’t windows, down the other corridor where the arrow on the enamel sign still pointed into the void. There was something consoling about the chaos in his office, like a warm, untidy bed inviting one to climb in. Dr Hellstieldl lifted the cosy off a pot and poured a glass of tea. He did it clumsily with the pot in one hand and the cosy in the other. Chanele watched him, as one might observe an event in the street that doesn’t concern one. When he held out the glass, she had first to think before she understood his gesture.
He sat down opposite her and said nothing. Saying nothing was plainly a considerable effort for him. More than once he made as if to speak and then left his words unsaid.
The tea was hot, and Chanele was grateful for it. The sun was still shining, although lower in the sky, but her whole body was shivering with a kind of cold that she had never felt before. Old people sometimes complained that they could never get warm any more. For the first time Chanele understood what they meant.
‘I called for a cab for you,’ Dr Hellstiedl said at last.
She nodded, grateful not to have to make any decisions for herself.
‘If you wish, I can keep you informed about his condition. In case a change… It could be, or it could not be. We know so little. And to combat our ignorance we have Latin and Greek names.’
He topped up her tea and then asked again: ‘Shall I…?’
‘No,’ Chanele said. It was the first word she had spoken since her meeting with her father.
She took the cab back into town. In the avenue, the poplars now cast long shadows.
In the square in front of the Minster a feast day was being celebrated, with happy people and cheerful music. Chanele thought of the big simcha that Menachem Bär had been so looking forward to, and to it she devoted every laughing face she glimpsed from the cab window.
The hotel porter welcomed her with chummy curiosity. How had her day been, he wanted to know, had she found the way and how did the esteemed Madame Meijer like Strasbourg? She silenced him with a tip.
That night she slept deeply and dreamlessly.
The next morning she took the train back to Basel and from there on to Baden. She went straight from the station to the shop and worked there as she did every day.
When she got home in the evening and Janki questioned her, she replied, ‘They made a mistake. It was someone completely different. He has nothing to do with me.’
24
Pinchas had to grab his shirt collar again to get some air, and that had nothing to do with the fact that the sun was beating down far too hot for the second day in a row. This man that Zalman Kamionker had introduced him to, this Dr Stern from Stuttgart, Congress delegate of the Württemberg Majority Socialists, was driving him completely insane. And he looked quite harmless, an outwardly inconspicuous man of middle age, not very tall, with a cosy, round little bourgeois belly, on which his watch chain did a skipping little dance each time he laughed. And he laughed a lot, in an unpleasant way. He said the most dreadful things, concluded them with a wobbly ‘Hohoho!’ and then wiped the back of his hand over his moustache. ‘God,’ he said, for example, ‘God does not exist, of course. I should know, I’m a rabbi.’ He made his belly wobble and looked at Pinchas with the natural expectancy of someone who already has a counter-argument ready for any objections.
He had in fact once been a rabbi, in Buttenhausen, a small congregation in the Swabian Jura. ‘I learned the job thoroughly,’ he said and laughed again, as if at the best possible joke. ‘No half measures where I’m concerned. Even today I can cast a glance at the innards of a chicken and tell you unerringly whether it’s kosher or not. Admittedly it’s an utterly meaningless skill, but I can still remember how to do it. The way other people can balance on their hands or walk a tightrope.’
Pinchas wouldn’t have been surprised if his interlocutor had performed one of those tricks on the spot. Dr Stern’s manner had much of the fairground barker about it, one of those men one sometimes encounters outside travelling theatres of curiosity, except that the attractions in his booth were not six-legged calves or women with fishtails, but the treasury of mysteriously glittering theses and the mirror-maze of brightly polished paradoxes. ‘Every true believer is proof that there is no God,’ he would say, for example, rocking springily back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if he was about to turn a somersault and shout ‘Hoppla!’.
He liked talking, almost compulsively, about how he had lost his faith, ‘freed himself from it’, as he called it, and it seemed that he often addressed large gatherings on the subject. He never had to search for a word, and his perfectly formulated sentences always sounded as if they were read from a manuscript. He had not been a rabbi for ages, but was the first chairman of the German Free-Thinkers’ Union, and he could, when he spoke of this association and its goals, adopt an expression every bit as unctuous as if he were still wearing the cassock. He put his unbelief on display in his buttonhole like a medal, he was proud of it as one might be proud of a doctorate acquired after a long period of study. There was something crusading about his atheism. Godlessness was his religion, and he advocated it with the fire and enthusiasm of the convert. When he said, ‘God is nothing but an invention of man,’ he beamed like Moses at the sight of the Shechinah on Mount Sinai.
The two men had met in the Palm Garden at around midday, and Kamionker had introduced them to one another. He did that with a sly smile whose meaning Pinchas only now understood. It was noisy and stuffy in the Palm Garden, so they decided to take advantage of the fine weather and take a short stroll in the park by the lake. Pinchas had prepared a whole list of questions about the Socialist Congress — the Israelit in Frankfurt would certainly be interested in an article on the subject — but he never got around to asking them. No sooner had Dr Stern learned that the actual profession of his new acquaintance was that of shochet, than he only wanted to talk about religion, or rather about the non-religion that was his deeply held credo. ‘Man should know and not believe,’ he said with devout emphasis, spreading his arms to welcome the whole world with a fraternal kiss into the newly founded alliance of the godless.