Chanele praised him for looking after Salomon so touchingly, but the truth was that Arthur enjoyed the long hours by the dying man’s bed. Just sitting there and listening to the even breathing gave him a feeling of usefulness with which he was otherwise unfamiliar. Arthur, the late addition, in fact considered himself superfluous, someone who had only come into the world when everything was already finished and distributed. Now at last he had a function, a task that he hadn’t had to take away from anyone, and which was entrusted to him gladly and even gratefully. He always pushed his chair very close to Salomon and sat there quite still, often long past his bedtime. And because his bar mitzvah was approaching, he chanted the whole of the sidra to Uncle Salomon again and again, with all the blessings and haftorohs; he recited the droosh, of the mitzvot that are bound to time, and from which women are therefore exempt, and repeated the whole thing so many times that Cantor Würzburger rapped him on the head with his knuckles in astonishment and said in pointed High German, ‘Look at this one, has the little door opened?’
If anything changed in Uncle Salomon’s condition, Arthur was always the first to notice. Even before anyone else spotted anything, his nose told him it was time to call Christine to clean the bed again. Uncle Salomon had been put in nappies, extra large and specially made for him in the tailor’s shop at the Modern Emporium, and when they were being changed, Christine would often pat the old man’s backside and say, ‘Yes, yes, yes, that’s better, isn’t it, that’s better.’
Salomon was looked after with great attentiveness, ‘in an almost exemplary fashion,’ said Dr Bolliger, you could tell that amongst the Jews the family still meant something, say what you like. None the less, one day there was that rotten smell, which Arthur was of course the first to catch. It was an open sore that came from lying down for a long time, and which ointments did nothing to help. Uncle Salomon regularly had to be turned, from his back onto his side, and from his side back onto his back, ‘like a piece of meat to be roasted on all sides,’ Christine said to Louisli. Even so, the smell got stronger, Dr Bolliger’s face grew thoughtful and Arthur felt guilty.
And then, on the morning of 20 August, on the eighth of Elul of the year 5653, Salomon Meijer stopped breathing. It didn’t happen as Arthur had expected, there was no gradual weakening or fading away. Uncle Salomon’s last breath was no different from all the others before, it was sure and steady, but no others came after it. Otherwise nothing at all had changed, the eyes were open, and the tongue that hung out of the mouth was still damp, but under the canvas the ribcage no longer rose and fell, and the rotten smell, to which Arthur had almost become accustomed, suddenly acquired a completely new meaning.
Nothing had happened that could have become a discovery. It was only that something had stopped happening.
Arthur came out of the room, ‘very quietly’, as Chanele later told Mimi, and said, ‘I think we should call the chevra.’
The men of the funeral fraternity were soon there; they had been expecting Salomon Meijer’s death, and everything was ready. One of the men screwed up his nose and said, ‘It was high time.’
That Sunday evening, when the corpse had long since been carried from the house and old Herr Blumberg, who had drunk away his fortune and now performed any duties asked of him, was keeping watch over him in the cemetery, the news came in that the vote had been lost, and the prohibition on shechita was now part of the constitution. Janki said, ‘That’s all we need!’ and later, whenever anyone talked about shechita, Arthur couldn’t help thinking about his dead Uncle Salomon.
Nothing unusual happened at the funeral, except that Herr Strähle, the hotel director, in ignorance of the more austere Jewish practices, sent a big wreath. Fat Christine and Louisli later plucked the flowers from it and used them to decorate their attic room.
For the shiva, Janki had the big table with the tropical wood top taken to the store-room; in its place the low stools for the mourners were arranged. Then the family sat there for a week, as people in Biblical times had sat on the floor as a sign of mourning, but what one sensed in them was less grief than relief.
Many visitors came, including some who had never known the beheimes trader Salomon Meijer. Arthur opened the door to everyone and pointed them to the dining room. No one had told him to do this; he had simply got used to having a task. Janki was delighted with every new arrival. He liked to be an important man in the Baden community, someone to whom respect was paid by participating in his loss.
None of the guests had put themselves out at home and cooked a meal for the mourners. Given that the family had its own cook, the old custom no longer really made any sense. But they did bring bread and cakes, more than could be eaten.
Although Chanele was not a real daughter, she sat with them there for the whole week, and no one was bothered by the fact. On the other hand some people raised objections to Mimi. Frau Pomeranz, they said, was not making the sort of face suitable for such an occasion. And in fact it could not be denied that Mimi was happily and absent-mindedly smiling away to herself the whole time.
Uncle Melnitz arrived with the visitors too, sat down and didn’t get up again. Pinchas, who had entrusted the butcher’s shop to his co-partner for the whole week and stayed in Baden, nodded to him, while Janki assiduously ignored Melnitz and looked at him only very covertly out of the corner of his eye. ‘If we just don’t take any notice of him,’ he thought, ‘sooner or later he’ll have to work out that he has no business here, that he’s dead and buried once and for all and no longer belongs in the present.’
But Uncle Melnitz sat where he was, and even if he didn’t say anything, he involved himself in the conversations by his mere presence.
Such a shiva is not only devoted to the shared commemoration of the dead, but also gives the bereaved the chance, in the long hours that they spend sitting together, to discuss everything that needs to be sorted out after a death. They quickly agreed that Chanele should take over the closure of the flat in Endingen, and that the small profit to be taken from it should go to the shnorrers that Salamon had so liked to look after in the last years of his life. A few of them had even turned up at the shiva, confident that grief might open the money bag.
Pinchas asked to be able to pick out anything useful to him from the books of the deceased. There would not be a great deal, that much was clear, because Salomon had not been a scholar in matters religious, and the writings that he had bought in his dotage on the subject of gematria belonged largely in the sphere of superstition.
The only argument centred on the Shabbos lamp that hung over the dining table in Endingen, and which both Mimi and Chanele would have liked to own. This good piece was made of brass and fitted with a device whereby the lamp could be lowered — ‘lamp down, worries up!’ — and then hung higher again after the end of Shabbos. It was filled with oil, and then the seven wicks burned from Friday evening until Saturday night, because on the Sabbath itself lighting a new light is of course forbidden. For Mimi, this lamp symbolised everything to do with home, all the security of her parents’ house, and it had a special significance for Chanele as well. For all those years it had been one of her tasks to prepare the lamp every Friday and clean it again every Sunday. The two women engaged in their debate in unusual manner: each insisted that the other should take the lamp, and out of pure concern and generosity they nearly came to blows. In the end they agreed that the lamp would go to Baden for the time being, but that it should not be hung there; in that way the difficult decision was put off until later.