But this reverse transformation was not complete, because at the same time Salomon’s face got older and older. His beard sprouted as if gaining additional power from the motionlessness of the rest of his body, and shaving his sagging skin proved difficult. So stubble turned to hairs, and hairs to clumps. The sideburn, so carefully groomed for so long, lost its contours, an island swathed in seaweed. The little red veins that for as long as Arthur could remember had always made his cheeks look so cheerful now disfigured that face like a rash.
Even they themselves didn’t notice that they were treating Salomon more and more like an infant. When they had wiped away his drool, it struck them as perfectly natural to pat his cheeks and say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, that’s better, isn’t it, that’s better.’ Later they didn’t talk to him at all, they did what needed to be done quickly and in silence, and left the room without looking round.
Although looking after the sick is not really among the duties of a cook, fat Christine proved particularly efficient at such tasks. The performed the most unpleasant duties as naturally as she might have scrubbed the scales from a carp or pulled the innards from the abdominal cavity of a freshly shechita-slaughtered chicken. ‘If you cook every day, nothing repels you,’ she once said to Arthur, and the longer he thought about that sentence, the worse food began to taste.
In the end he was the only one to spend long hours by Salomon’s bed. Janki looked into the room once a day when he came back from the Modern Emporium, stood in the doorway still in coat and hat and didn’t actually come inside. ‘Is everything all right, Salomon?’ he would ask, or, ‘Do you have everything you need?’ When no answer came, as indeed no answer could, Janki cleared his throat two or three times, executed an almost military turn and left. He never closed the door behind him, it was as if he feared the finality of a lock clicking shut.
Chanele came more often, but only ever when Arthur wasn’t there and she could be alone with Salomon. Once Arthur had come into the room without knocking — and what would have been the point of that, when Salomon could hardly have shouted ‘Come in!’? — and Chanele had been sitting there with Salomon’s hand in hers, crying. Arthur was quiet, and went out again without her noticing; there was something indecent and forbidden about seeing his own mother crying.
Only Hinda treated Uncle Salomon as she always had, even after weeks. Every time she visited she chatted away about the trivialities of her everyday life, as one does with a dear friend whom one sees so often that everything important has already been said. If Uncle Salomon really had still been able to hear anything, he would have known more about her than anyone else, including things that Hinda didn’t confide in anyone else, that she had kissed Zalman Kamionker, and that it had been quite different from kissing father or mother after bentching on Friday evening. He had put his tongue in her mouth, an idea only that meshugena could have come up with, but it hadn’t even been unpleasant, ‘like a little soft animal’, Hinda confided in Uncle Salomon, and if she blushed he couldn’t see it anyway. Kamionker had already found work in Zurich; he knew how to use a sewing machine, and nobody could have predicted that. ‘He can do everything,’ said Hinda.
François never came. Worrying about someone who wasn’t even aware of it and couldn’t be grateful for it was utterly pointless as far as he was concerned.
Twice Pinchas and Mimi came from Zurich. There was something out of the ordinary about them, Arthur noticed immediately. Pinchas now walked along very close to his wife, as if to protect her, and Mimi was unusually nice to Arthur, stroked his head and mussed his hair. She even brought him some presents, once a red and white candy cane, and once a kaleidoscope with little coloured shards of glass that kept assembling themselves into new patterns. She called him ‘Cousin Arthur’, and then had to hold a handkerchief up in front of her mouth, it made her laugh so much. When she saw her father lying there, his eyes rolled back in their sockets and his tongue hanging out, she burst into tears and said, ‘Mon Dieu, ah, mon Dieu.’ But she didn’t cry for long. Then she had to shut herself away with Chanele in Chanele’s room and talk to her for ages.
Mostly Arthur was alone with Uncle Salomon. He sat for hours on a chair beside his bed, always bringing a book along and never reading it. He had understood that Uncle Salomon was going to die, and he wasn’t even afraid of it. In fact he was afraid of missing the exact moment when someone was living and then they weren’t, because Arthur had decided to become a doctor, not just an ordinary doctor, but the kind who makes discoveries and whom people travel from far away to come and see. If you managed to observe the moment of death, it seemed to him, if one could observe it very precisely, it must also be possible to find a cure for it. Thomas Edison had made 493 inventions, probably even more than that by now, and every time he had started with a very simple observation.
Now Arthur always ran home after school as quickly as he could, and was first to go into the sewing-room. Then when he heard regular breathing he was reassured and relieved.
He had already made one discovery, and a very important one, in fact. Dr Bolliger, who had come every day at first and later only twice a week, had even said to Chanele, ‘He’s extended your father’s life with that.’ Uncle Salomon wasn’t Chanele’s father, but it would have been too complicated to explain that to the doctor.
Arthur’s discovery went like this: at first it had been impossible to feed Uncle Salomon. He didn’t notice if you put a spoon into his mouth, and the soup or milk just flowed back out of it. Or if it didn’t run back out his breath would suddenly stop, and he had to straighten the heavy body and slap it on the back. ‘You’re not the kind of woman one has to mince words with,’ Bolliger had said to her, and Arthur had pressed himself very quietly into the corner lest he be sent from the room. ‘Your father will not die from a sudden blow, but from a lack. And not from hunger, but from thirst. Man can survive for a very long time without food, in India there are supposed to be fakirs who don’t eat a mouthful for forty days, but thirst is something quite different. If your father can’t take any fluids…’ He had moved his head meaningfully back and forth, and Chanele had said, ‘Perhaps it’s better that way.’
But then Arthur made his discovery. He had experimented, just like Edison, he had tried out all possible methods and then happened upon it: if you pressed the full spoon down on the tongue a little, at a very precise spot very far back, Uncle Salomon swallowed, or rather: his throat swallowed. It didn’t work every time, but Arthur became more and more skilled at it, so Uncle Salomon didn’t go thirsty, and Dr Bolliger said, ‘You have quite an unusual boy there, Frau Meijer.’
One could not have said that Arthur took over the care of his uncle all by himself; without fat Christine, who could straighten Uncle Salomon up or turn him over as if he were no heavier than a bag of onions, he couldn’t have done it. But it was Arthur who spooned fluid into the helplessly gaping mouth, mostly luke-warm broth whose recipe came from Aunt Golde, made from a whole pound of stripped flank. Arthur suggested trying the special drink that was known in his family as Techías Hameisim tea, but Dr Bolliger explained that the cloves and schnapps would be too irritating for the unconscious man’s throat. ‘The swallowing reflex is still there, but we don’t want to check whether the coughing reflex is still working.’ Arthur was proud that the doctor addressed him as an equal, almost as one specialist to another. The only other person who had ever taken him so seriously was Uncle Salomon.