Pinchas sat down. What option did he have? His interlocutor, that much was clear to him, was not one of those people who can be deterred from telling a story once they have started it.
‘This is already…’ Dr Stern began, and adopted that artificially reflective face that loquacious people often put on in order to give often-repeated stories the appearance of spontaneous authenticity. ‘In fact, more than ten years ago now. How time passes! It was clear to me at last, once and for all, that I could no longer reconcile it with my conscience, telling my little flock… A lovely term, isn’t it?’ he interrupted himself, and even that interruption seemed to be part of his manuscript. ‘Little flock. It so accurately describes the submissive lack of criticism with which even thoroughly intelligent people credulously trot along with the herd of their religion, always encircled by the barking dogs of the punishments of hell and eternal damnation. As I say, it was clear to me that I would be being unfaithful to myself if I went on interpreting laws to my congregation that I no longer believed in myself — even though the interpretations themselves were still entirely correct. Utterly meaningless, like all religious mumbo-jumbo, but correct. If you consider: a God who is concerned in all seriousness with the question of whether the pitum is broken off an essrog, such a detail-obsessed heavenly trifler, can only be an invention of humanity! Only we humans are stupid enough to glue our view of the world together from mere trivia.’
‘And your view of the world, Dr Stern?’
The free-thinker heard the irritable undertone and seemed to be pleased, a conjuror who has directed his audience’s attention exactly where he wants it. ‘I deal with the main issue, and flatter myself that I have thus achieved something greater than all those regulation-obsessed Talmud greats. With one exception. Does the name Elisha ben Abuyah mean anything to you?’
Pinchas nodded. ‘Acher,’ he said. ‘The Other.’
‘Very good.’ Dr Stern nodded to him with schoolmasterly condescension. ‘Excellent. That is how he is always referred to in the scriptures. “The Other.” And why? Because he was not even granted that name after he, the great teacher of the Law, had reached the only possible conclusion: that there is in fact no God. And do you know how he lost his faith?’
Pinchas had studied the relevant passage of the Talmud not long before. It concerned a boy ordered by his father to fetch eggs from the nest, but first to chase away the mother bird, as it is written: ‘You shall let the mother fly and take only the young, that you may thrive and that you may long endure’ — the same reward that the Torah promises for the keeping of the Commandment to honour one’s father and mother. In spite of that twofold promise, the boy fell and broke his neck. And that is supposed to have been the moment when Elisha ben Abuyah became an apostate.
‘You cannot use that argument,’ Pinchas said, ‘if you bear in mind what Rashi says about the passage “that you may long endure”…’
‘I’m impressed.’ Dr Stern applauded ironically, and Pinchas could have slapped him. ‘So you know that passage from kiddushim. But I like the explanation that Talmud gives in the treatise of Khagiga — 14b, if you want to look it up — much better.’
‘I know that passage too,’ said Pinchas, but Dr Stern had closed his eyes as if to remember better, and recited, almost singing, as one does during a lecture. ‘Ben Asai, ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah and Rabbi Akiba meditated long enough over the glory of God until they could glimpse the uppermost sphere. Ben Asai died. Ben Soma lost his reason. Elisha ben Abuyah fell from faith. And only Rabbi Akiba…’
‘I see no reason to make fun.’ Pinchas had spoken much more loudly than he had actually intended. A young woman who was walking past the bench with her pram, quickened her pace in alarm.
‘I’m not making fun,’ Dr Stern said. ‘On the contrary. I have always felt a great affinity with this Acher. Perhaps he actually did glimpse heaven, and established that it was empty.’
‘I have to go now. I can’t leave my butcher’s shop alone as long as this.’ Pinchas was about to get up, but Dr Stern would not let him. He held him back as a circus barker might an indecisive peasant.
‘Wait, dear friend. I haven’t yet told you my story.’
‘I don’t know if I want to hear it.’
‘Of course you want to hear it. You are a curious person. Did you not come here just to ask me questions?’
‘Not these questions!’
‘Because the answers might shatter your picture of the world?’
‘No!’
But Pinchas stopped making as if to stand up, and Dr Stern laughed, making his watch chain skip, wiped his moustache and said, ‘Let’s wait a moment! So, as I said, I had understood at last that I could no longer perform my office. Because — unlike most people, as I have been forced time and again to observe — I am not afraid of drawing conclusions from my discoveries, I decided to draw a clear line. So I wrote to the Supreme Royal Württemberg Rabbinate and declared to them, to my superior authority, that I was abdicating from Jewry.’
‘What nonsense!’ Pinchas had raised his voice too loudly again, and really had to force himself to utter his next sentences in a more moderate tone. To his annoyance it now sounded as if he were about to confide an intimate secret to the man beside him on the bench. ‘You can’t step down from Jewry! We’re not a club!’
‘That’s exactly what the Supreme Rabbinate said to me. Amongst some very wordy admonitions. But I am a consistent person, and someone who doesn’t want to play the game no longer needs to adhere to the rules. So at the next Yom Kippur I went and stood with a bag of ham rolls outside the main synagogue in Stuttgart, and when all the dignitaries walked out of the door with their black top hats on…’
‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ Pinchas had leapt to his feet, and he no longer cared in the slightest that passers-by were staring at him. ‘You should be thoroughly, thoroughly ashamed of yourself.
Dr Stern smiled in friendly challenge at the man who stood so furiously before him. ‘A pity you aren’t Catholic. “Apage, Satanas” would simply sound better.’
‘Ashamed!’
‘You have said that before, my dear friend. But perhaps you should consider whether you yourself might not have more reason to be so. A man of your profession.’
‘What does my profession…?’
‘You are a shochet, are you not? And thus a professional, approved animal-torturer.’
‘I’m not a…’
‘You shouldn’t shout so loudly. The two policemen coming along the path over there already look quite suspicious.’
Pinchas had no choice but to sit down again.
‘How can you claim that a shochet…?’
But Dr Stern had suddenly stopped enjoying the debate. He drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and let it spring open. ‘So late? I’m neglecting my duties as a delegate. Do you know what, dear friend? Read my brochure. Animal Torture and Animal Life in Jewish Literature. Available in every bookshop. With a rabbinical-theological appendix about shechita. It might interest you. I have been told that this little essay will play a big part in the coming plebiscite in these parts. Now farewell, dear friend, farewell.’
25
At the same time as Pinchas was talking to Jakob Stern or, as he later said only half ironically, arguing with the devil, his wife received an unexpected visitor.
Mimi wasn’t feeling well that day. It was probably because of the much too sultry weather that she felt dizzy when she tried to stand up, and had to lie down in bed for an hour again with a cloth soaked in lemon water over her forehead. Regula, the great lump, wanted to open the curtains without the slightest delicacy, when a beam of light would go like a knife through the head of a sensitive person in such a condition. Later Mimi even had to throw up, and it was already almost eleven when she finally summoned the strength to leave her room. In a peignoir of salmon-coloured crêpe Georgette had lined with matt silk, which set off the pallor of her face to extremely good effect, she crept through the flat like a ghost. Nothing was moving anywhere. Even the breakfast plates were still on the dining-room table. If one wasn’t constantly chasing them — Pinchas had no idea! — the servants immediately became slapdash.