If Hinda had been there, she would immediately have noticed the similarity between mother and son. Frau Kahn too had the habit of moving her head back and forth like a neckless owl. A pair of spectacles with round lenses further intensified the impression.
‘I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Madame Meijer.’ She couldn’t have uttered the phrase more precisely with an etiquette guide in front of her.
‘Frau Kahn also has a very charming daughter,’ Mimi said, and nudged Chanele with her knee in a very unladylike manner.
‘She is here,’ said the owl. ‘My Mina is such a good child that she wouldn’t dream of missing an opportunity to be present at a charitable event. I’m always telling her, “Young as you are, you don’t need to worry about such things!” — but it’s like talking to a wall. Over there — you see how hard she’s working?’
The daughter of the biggest silk importing business was easy to spot among the volunteers. A skinny girl, younger than all the others, was folding clothes at one of the tables. In her concentration she had bent her head so far forward that her long black hair hid her face like a widow’s veil. Chanele could only see that she wore glasses, like her mother. Her movements showed that indecisive caution that arises either out of short-sightedness or out of a lack of confidence. There didn’t seem to be anything really striking about her, but when she carried a stack of folded clothes to the laundry baskets, she seemed to swing a stiff right leg forwards in a semicircle with each step she took, and her body swung back and forth in counterbalance, as if she were drunk.
‘Polio,’ said Frau Kahn. ‘The poor child has to wear a metal brace.’
When all the clothes were sorted and all the comments on them passed — on the subject of Mimi’s donation, everyone agreed that she displayed both good taste and a tendency to wasteful frivolity — liqueurs and cakes were passed around, a generous and unanimously applauded donation from the esteemed President. The seating arrangement at the two long tables seemed to happen quite naturally, but followed strict rules of rank and age, with Zippora Meisels and Malka Grünfeld naturally holding court in the middle. Chanele, the unadorned simplicity of whose dress was interpreted, perfectly in line with Mimi’s plan, as the whim of a wealthy woman who doesn’t need to show off, was given the seat of honour beside the president, and pulled the resisting Mina Kahn down onto the chair beside her.
‘Perhaps I should really…’ the girl began to protest, but she wasn’t used to contradicting people.
Seen from close to, Mina had an unusually interesting face which, like the optical illusions that Arthur collected with such enthusiasm, seemed to tell a quite different story from one glance to the next. At one moment Mina was an intimidated girl who hardly dared look up from the floor, and a moment later an adult woman who had had to experience far too much already.
‘Perhaps it’s because of her illness,’ Chanele though. ‘Suffering can make you old. Or childish.’
They talked about unimportant things, passing the obligatory trivia to one another, as one passes salt or the bread basket at the dinner table. Only one thing that Mina said made Chanele prick her ears up. ‘Do you sometimes have the feeling,’ she asked out of nowhere, ‘that people only talk so they don’t have to listen?’
The general chat meandered like a river without waterfalls, through the most varied subjects, and landed at last with the plebiscite which was due that summer.
‘What will your Pinchas do,’ Mimi was asked, ‘if shechita is banned in Switzerland?’
‘He’s quite sure that the initiative will not be passed. Shechita is one of the most painless methods of slaughtering that there are. If one only explains that sensibly to people…’
‘Sensibly?’ Zippora Meisels grimly shook her head with its flaming red wig. ‘It would be the first time reason had achieved anything against rish’es.’
A whole row of wigs was seen to nod thoughtfully. Rish’es, the collective word for every kind of anti-Jewishness, is always a convincing argument.
‘My husband’s business friends’, Malka Grünfeld said with the pride of a woman for whom it always comes as a pleasant surprise that her husband even has any business friends, ‘all assure him that they will vote against the plebiscite.’
‘Initiative,’ a voice corrected her. ‘It’s an initiative.’
‘It doesn’t matter what it’s called,’ Malka said loftily. ‘The matter will be rejected in any case.’
‘If people had to state their opinion publicly, perhaps.’ Mina had so far only spoken when she was spoken to, and the surprised reactions clearly showed that in this particular circle they did not like it when unexperienced young things opened their mouths. Nonetheless Mina went on, although she avoided looking anyone in the eye. ‘But such a vote is not public. You just have to put a Yes or a No on your piece of paper and no one sees what they throw into the urn.’
‘My husband’s business partners…’ Malka Grünfeld began again.
‘One must take things as they are,’ Mina said, actually interrupting the president of the Hachnasat Kallah Association. ‘There’s no point in pretending.’
‘Quite right!’ said Chanele, so loudly that everyone looked at her. Then she apologised to the ladies because she absolutely couldn’t miss the train to Baden.
When Pinchas came home at last from his conversation with Dr Stern, Chanele had left again, taking Hinda with her.
‘She came with me to the clothes collection,’ Mimi said, concealing behind voluble lists of trivia the things that she wanted to keep to herself, ‘although she really hasn’t been brought up for such occasion. And afterwards she was suddenly in a great hurry, you know how she is. Hinda wasn’t happy to go with her. They even had an argument about it. Even though there’s a fair in Baden at the weekend, the little one absolutely wanted to stay in Zurich for Shabbos, one might have imagined there was nothing more important to her in the world. It’s always so cosy at our house, she says. But do you know what I think? You’ll never guess! Do you know what I think?’
‘My dear,’ said Pinchas, ‘if I could translate every page of Gemara as easily as I can your face, I would be the greatest Talmid Chochem in the world.’
‘So, what am I thinking?’
‘You’re thinking: Zalman Kamionker.’ He put his arm around his wife and drew her to him. ‘Don’t look so disappointed. It wasn’t a very hard task. The young man inquired so insistently after Hinda today…’
‘But you don’t know about the other story,’ Mimi consoled herself, feeling her new-found friendship with Chanele as a precious warmth within her.
Pinchas too had something to report, the crazy tale of a rabbi who had become an atheist, and now tried to prove the worthlessness of the Talmud using Talmudic quotations. On the way home he had firmly undertaken, when telling it, to stress only the comical aspects of the story, and to give no sign of how troubled he had been by the discussion. But he didn’t get round to it for the time being, because at that moment Regula brought in a letter that had arrived that afternoon. She didn’t bring it in on a tray, as Mimi had been trying to teach her for weeks, but had set it down on a perfectly ordinary plate like a slice of bread.
‘Ah, les servants!’ Mimi sighed, and Regula marched out, insulted. You don’t have to know foreign languages to notice when someone’s talking disparagingly about you.
The letter was addressed in old-fashioned writing and green ink. In a skilfully embellished hand it said, ‘Pinchas Pomeranz, Esquire.’ Pinchas tore open the envelope — with his fingernail, even though Mimi had given him a letter opener with an ivory handle! — cast his eyes over the contents and frowned in puzzlement.