As they did every year at Pesach, almost the whole of the Zurich family had gathered together. They had got used to the fact that two of them were missing, that there should really have been two more chairs around the table, each with its cushion, that there should have been two more glasses on the white table-cloth. One was left with no other option but to get used to it.
It was now seven years since François…
It was seven years ago, and it still didn’t seem natural. On the contrary: the silence about the thing no one wanted to mention got louder every year. ‘As if we were all patients,’ Arthur reflected, ‘still feeling a limb that was amputated long ago.’
All the other Meijers were there. In fact it wasn’t at all correct to call them ‘the Meijers’, because they were called Pomeranz and Kamionker, but if one had asked them that was what they would have called themselves too. On the sideboard, as if by way of proof, stood the photograph for which Salomon and Golde had once reluctantly posed, she with her sheitel, which sat at an angle like a wonky tea cosy, he supporting himself on his umbrella like a general on his sword, both their faces contorted, by the requirement to stand still for a long time, into stern masks, as if to intimidate posterity. The photograph had faded; Hinda kept planning to put it in a different place where the sun wouldn’t shine on it so directly, but she kept forgetting. There were too many other things to do in this household.
Today of all days, when the Seder needed to be prepared for the whole mishpocha, she needed four hands or at least a maidservant. At the Kamionkers’ they only had a cleaning lady, for a few hours a day, and even she sometimes had to wait longer for her wages than was strictly respectable. Frau Zwicky wasn’t very efficient, and she certainly didn’t show a great deal of initiative, she didn’t see the work if you didn’t hold it up in front of her nose, but she had two little children at home and a husband who hadn’t earned any money since an accident. You don’t fire someone like that; Zalman would never have allowed it. ‘Can’t you stop being a trade unionist at least at home?’ Hinda had once asked him, and received the answer, ‘Then I would be someone else, and getting involved with a strange man is adultery, Frau Kamionker.’
In the end Hinda didn’t care if her household wasn’t run perfectly. As long as her husband was amused by the inevitable little disasters — why should she get worked up? Once, when the children were still small, they had had a visit, a preannounced visit, please note, and there had been a full pot de chambre — in such delicate cases Mimi wasn’t the only one who spoke French — in the middle of the room. The ladies of the Russian Refugees’ Relief Committee talked about the matter for ages afterwards, and didn’t know what they should be more outraged about: the unspeakable object itself, or the fact that that Hinda had only laughed at the embarrassing event.
Zalman, who was an extremely hard worker, could have forged a career for himself, he should have been a cloth preparer or even a shop-floor manager, instead of going on sitting by the sewing machine like a simple tailor, ruining his eyes, but sooner or later he always ended up having a row with his boss over some kind of injustice that didn’t even affect him personally, but only ever affected other people who couldn’t defend themselves or didn’t dare to. Most of them were Jews from the East, many of whom had fled to Zurich after the Tsarist pogroms of 1905, and who came quite as naturally to Zalman Kamionker as the shnorrers had once come to Salomon Meijer in Endingen. Zalman found them jobs, fought their battles for them and often won them, too, and when after a victoriously fought battle he was thrown out on the street, he always reported proudly on his dismissal when he got home. ‘You’re meshuga,’ Hinda would say, and Zalman would reply, ‘Luckily so — otherwise you’d get far too bored with me.’
It was a good marriage, even though money was always in short supply in the Kamionker household. But what’s money? When Hinda saw her husband sitting in the place of honour as Seder host, having the bowl and towel for the washing of the hands passed to him, in this setting he was Croesus, and the Seder would have been unthinkable anywhere else, not at the Pomeranzes’, where sickly Mimi could never have done all the work, and not at Arthur’s, because his bachelor flat didn’t even have a big enough table. And of course not at Mina’s, poor Mina who deserved such sympathy after her husband and son…
Don’t think about it. Not today.
Today was Pesach, a joyful celebration, a day of liberation and redemption. ‘All who are hungry, come and eat; all who are in need, come and celebrate Seder.’ They had told the story of the flight from Egypt, they had asked the traditional questions — ‘What distinguishes this night from all other nights?’ — and given the traditional answers, they had heard about the four sons, the clever one, the bad one, the stupid one and the one who doesn’t know how to ask questions, they had listed the plagues of Egypt and for each plague spilled a drop of wine from their full cups — if others are suffering, one should diminish one’s own joy — they had eaten the things that one eats on this evening, the symbolic foods, sweet, gluey charoset and bitter horseradish, as well as the worldly ones, matzo balls and gefilte fish, they were already singing the Shir Hama’a lot that introduces the table prayer, they would have been a Jewish family like any other, a happy family, even though François…
Don’t think about it.
As always, the singing turned into a friendly little competition. From Kolomea, Zalman had brought with him a different pronunciation and tunes different from those familiar in Switzerland, and was now drowned out by the rest of the family. The result was a cheerful cacophony that made even Pinchas chuckle, even though he took the religious traditions more seriously than anyone else.
Zalman sat at the head of the table like a king — ‘no, like an emperor’, thought Hinda, because the more his moustache invaded his cheeks, the more Zalman looked like the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph.
He was an enthusiastic father, who would have loved to bring a whole dynasty of little Kamionkers into the world. When Ruben was born, nineteen years ago now, Zalman had loudly declared at the bris, inspired by paternal pride and mazel tov bronfen: ‘I already know the names for the next ones,’ and had started listing them all, ‘Simon, Levy, Yehuda, Dan, Naftali…’ to indicate that he, like the patriarch Jacob, wanted to have thirteen children, twelve sons and a daughter. There had only been three in the end, Ruben and the twin girls, but the number thirteen had retained its special secret significance for Zalman and Hinda. Even now, when they were a long-standing couple and far beyond such silliness, he could still make his wife blush with embarrassment at dull social occasions by whispering in her ear, ‘Wouldn’t you rather go home and complete the thirteen?’
Ruben saw his mother smiling and thought reproachfully, ‘Her mind isn’t on it.’ Uncle Pinchas, to whom this honour fell at every Seder, had just struck up the table prayer, and for the fulfilment of the commandment it isn’t enough just to join in with the communal singing out of habit, while following one’s own train of thought, no, one must speak the text word for word along with everyone else, and be aware of its meaning. For some time Ruben had felt obliged to think rigorously about religious matters, because after the feast days he would be leaving Switzerland for at least a year to study at the yeshiva. Not one of the big, famous yeshivas, he wasn’t such a brilliant student as that, but still a real one, meaning one in the East. At first Zalman, for whom the traditions of his religion meant more than their study, had not been at all keen on Ruben’s wish, and had even hurt Uncle Pinchas, who often studied with Ruben, with the accusation that he was determined to turn his son into a rebbe, when he didn’t have the mind for it. But in the end he had yielded — ‘If someone wants to be an apple tree, you’ll be waiting a long time for pears!’ — and had organised a year’s study for Ruben in his home town of Kolomea, along with lodging at the home of a friend from his tallis-sewing days, who was even willing to put Ruben up in his house for nothing. ‘I would do anything for a son of Zalman Kamionker,’ the friend had written. This generosity had something to do with a fight with drunk Ruthenians, who had considered it pleasing in the sight of God to break the nose of a young Jew one Sunday after church. ‘There were six of them, and he was alone,’ said Zalman. ‘I am a peaceful man, but I really had to get stuck in.’