‘I’m already looking forward,’ said Councillor Bugmann, when he held out her coat, ‘to being able to enjoy another of those delicious meals in your lovely home.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Chanele, walking through the door that he held open for her. ‘My husband and I have decided not to continue with the tradition of our evening invitations.’
The office boy from the antechamber still hung on his stool like a crooked question mark. Chanele stopped beside him for a moment and said benignly, ‘By the way — you have ink on your face.’
30
‘No article is going to be published,’ was all she said, and Janki asked no questions.
They were sitting around the oversized dining room table — tropical wood! — as if to depict a living picture entitled Family at Dinner for some invisible spectator, without the slightest notion of how such a thing would be done. Janki had rested his walking stick against the table, and was still clutching the freshly glued-on lion’s head. He sat where he always sat, no one had secretly moved the table or switched the chairs, and still, although he couldn’t have explained his feeling of unease to himself, he didn’t really feel as if he was sitting at the top of the table any more.
François had made a show of not being hungry, and had only sat down at the table on an order from his father. He had pushed his plate listlessly aside and instead put the tantalus with the yellowish fluid in front of him, the one that was normally on the sideboard. With one of the ivory toothpicks that were only put on the table for big meals — a soapstone knave held a dozen ready, like spears before the battle — he ran his finger, as if there nothing more important in the world, around the tiny silver lock whose key had been missing for ever. ‘If I am going to be kept prisoner here,’ said every one of his movements, ‘then at least I can do something useful and try to get this thing open at last.’
Hinda, who normally chatted merrily away over any ill humour, had for once been infected be the general gloom, and stirred her soup with a face as stony as if the soup had been prescribed her by her doctor against her will.
No one noticed that Arthur said not a word and did not once look up from his plate. They were used to him being like that. He was often so preoccupied with his own thoughts that you had to ask him questions three times before he finally heard you. When he was in a good mood, Janki would laugh, calling him, ‘Our little philosopher!’ On other days he struck his glass with his spoon, and when everyone looked at him, he would say with cutting friendliness, ‘If the professor would like to give us the honour of his attention…?’
Louisli’s eyes were red from weeping when she set the soup tureen down on the table. In her case at least one didn’t have to look for an explanation.
After a long silence Chanele finally cleared her throat. ‘Janki, I think you should give Herr Ziltener a small raise. He hasn’t been having a very easy time lately.’
Janki didn’t contradict her, as he would automatically have done on any other day, but said only, ‘If you think so…’ and reached again for the handle of his walking stick to check it with his fingers.
And then they had a visitor. At a time of day when no one paid visits in Baden.
Louisli announced the visitor as if announcing a death. ‘Someone would like to speak to the lady and gentleman of the house. A Herr Kamionker.’
In the books that Arthur devoured in his every free minute, people were often said to be gasping for air. He had always thought it was just a figure of speech, like ‘He got cold feet’ or ‘His hair stood straight up on end.’ But when Hinda heard the visitor’s name, she did exactly that: she gasped for air.
Even in Zurich, at Pinchas and Mimi’s, Zalman Kamionker had been out of place. In Janki’s dining room, which was furnished not to be comfortable but to impress, with his clumsy shoes and patched trousers he looked as out of place as Herr Bischoff, the goyish caretaker, at Yom Kippur, when all the men were wearing their white sargenes, and he crept through the prayer room in his worn dark suit to open or close the windows. Except that Herr Bischoff always drew his head in to make himself invisible with his hunched posture, while Zalman Kamionker stood in splay-legged confidence on the green carpet as if he were the man in charge and the others the incomers. He had pushed his greasy leather cap a little back from his forehead, a craftsman who is about to perform a difficult task.
‘I have come here,’ he said in his strange accent, half Swabian, half Yiddish, ‘I have come here because Fräulein Hinda has already left Zurich.’
Hinda stared into her plate as if there could be nothing more interesting in the world that a lump of potato and a fibre of meat.
‘By the way: Frau Pomeranz isn’t very well. At lunchtime today she was as white as a sheet. But you are not to worry on her account, she said to tell you.’
Who was this strange person, thought Chanele, bringing her news of Mimi?
‘I have something I would like to tell Fräulein Hinda, if you will permit me,’ Kamionker continued.
‘If you will permit me,’ he said but his whole posture made it clear that he would still have said what he had to say whether anyone minded or not.
Janki sat up very straight, as Monsieur Delormes had done in the event of unwelcome disturbances. This was still his dining room, and he had not invited this strange man. ‘Whatever it is — couldn’t it wait until tomorrow?’
The question was clearly meant rhetorically, but Zalman seemed to be deaf to undertones. He thought for a moment, with the serious face of a man who has a serious decision to make, and then shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It can’t wait till tomorrow.’
And without anyone asking him to, he took a chair and joined them at the table.
‘He’s not one to stand on ceremony,’ thought Chanele.
‘Would you perhaps like a plate as well?’ Janki asked sarcastically.
‘That’s very kind of you.’ The uninvited visitor shook his head. ‘Maybe later.’ He put both hands on the table cloth the way one prepares a tool that one is going to use later. His fingernails weren’t quite clean.
Hinda was still holding her spoon. A grey thread of potato soup dripped unnoticed back onto the plate.
‘Alors?’ said Janki patiently. Monsieur Delormes had always said ‘Alors?’ in exactly that tone as well.
Kamionker nodded gratefully, as if he had just been given the floor at a public assembly. ‘So it’s like this,’ he said, ‘I was in Zurich at this Congress, and now it’s over.’
Only now did Chanele match him up with the man Mimi had told her about. ‘You’re the man from America,’ she said.
‘The Yankee from Kolomea, that’s right.’
‘And you’ve come all the way to Baden just to say goodbye to my daughter?’
Arthur glanced at Hinda out of the corner of his eye. Her teeth were sunk firmly into her lower lip, as he had seen at Aunt Golde’s. ‘That must hurt,’ Arthur thought.
‘So it’s like this,’ Kamionker repeated, ‘for the last few days I’ve been at this Congress, and I met a man from Vitebsk. A shoemaker, but a nebbish as weedy as a tailor. His brother emigrated to New York, and so did two of his uncles.’
‘Could you kindly explain to us why that should interest us?’ François interrupted him in his most rudely polite voice.
Kamionker looked at him with unexcited curiosity, as a tourist might look at an unusual piece of local architecture. ‘It wouldn’t interest you,’ he said. ‘But it might interest your sister. Mightn’t it, Fräulein Hinda?’