Once, just as the others were chorusing ‘Omeyn!’, a belch escaped him. He leapt to his feet, clicked his heels together and seemed about to launch into an apology. But then he forgot what he had wanted to say, looked around with confused eyes and sat down again.
Arthur took off his glasses and pressed his fingertips against the bridge of his nose. ‘The poor boy doesn’t know where he belongs,’ he thought. ‘That’s the most terrible thing that can happen to anybody.’
Hinda had taken Mina’s hand and was gripping it very tightly. The gesture said, ‘I know how you are feeling right now,’ and Mina was grateful for the pious lie. Of course Hinda, to whom nothing really bad had ever happened in her whole life, couldn’t begin to imagine what was going on in her sister-in-law’s mind, but consolation draws its power not from understanding but from good intentions. So Mina’s son was suddenly sitting at the table, an only child, in the wrong place at the wrong time and in the wrong world, drunk and chaotic and ridiculous, and she couldn’t throw her arms around him and press him to her, she couldn’t just kiss away his confusion, as she had kissed away his little hurts when he was a little child. She could only look at him. All her life she had had to look at everything.
Zalman, the master of the house, tried to act as if nothing at all had happened. He didn’t really succeed. He sang the Hallel more loudly than necessary, and after the fourth cup he wiped his lips with ostentatious nonchalance. Then they had come to the very last part of the Seder, the medieval songs that no longer have any ritual significance, and which you only sing because they’ve always been sung and the evening would be incomplete without them. They sang the ‘Adir hu’ and very suddenly, at ‘bimheyro, bimheyro’, Alfred joined in with the song. He hadn’t been at a Seder for seven years, and he had only sung with his fraternity brothers, ‘Gaudeamus igitur’ and ‘When the Romans got too bold’. But now a memory had welled up in him, perhaps because he was too drunk to avoid it, and he sang along with the others as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
Ruben immediately fell silent; in his severe youthful religiosity it felt like a sin to sing a song praising the mystical qualities of God along with someone who had been baptised. But not even Uncle Pinchas wanted to be a part of this silent protest, so at the next refrain he joined in with the chorus with renewed vigour. Ruben had a rough voice into which the occasional squeak crept, as if, even though he was old enough for the yeshiva, his voice hadn’t quite finished breaking.
Alfred, on the other hand, intoned the old melodies with a velvet-soft baritone that made you forget his beer breath and inappropriate suit. He had closed his eyes now and smiled to himself as he sang. ‘A little boy,’ thought Désirée.
They sang the songs with all the repetitions. Towards the end of the next song, an Aramaic round about the lamb that the father bought for two zuzim, they all fell silent as if by mutual agreement and let Alfred sing the last repetition on his own. He actually remembered — seven years! — the whole backward chain of events by heart, he had the slaughterman kill the oxen, and the oxen drink the water, the water put out the fire, the fire burned the stick, the stick struck the dog, the dog bit the cat because it had eaten the lamb that the father had bought for two zuzim, the lamb, the lamb.
After the last song of Seder there is always a moment of awkwardness. One has followed the prescribed ritual for a whole evening, one has pursued a familiar path and must now find one’s own direction again. On this evening — what distinguishes this night from all other nights? — this feeling was particularly strong. They all looked at Alfred, who still sat there rocking gently and listening to his own voice. Then Alfred opened his eyes, not like someone waking up, but someone who’s been startled, he looked at them and got to his feet, clicked his heels and said, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t belong here.’ And walked to the door, as bolt upright as drunks sometimes walk, and belched once more and was gone.
‘Scandaleux,’ said Mimi.
Désirée’s fingernail circled the rim of her cup.
With any luck Papa would be home soon.
In the prayer room of the Israelite Orthodox Community morning-service ended a little later than it did in the big synagogue on Löwenstrasse. Here all the traditional interpolations and additional prayers were treated with great precision; after all they hadn’t only split from the big community because of the harmonium and the women’s voices in the synagogue choir. They wanted to preserve the traditional Ashkenazi traditions, without exception, because if one stops filling up the holes in a dam for as much a day, sooner or later the floods will be unstoppable.
Pinchas had not joined the religious society at first. With excessive correctness he had feared he might be accused of self-interested motives, because of course the Orthodox members of the dissident congregation were the best customers a kosher provision merchant could have. But that had been almost twenty years ago, and there had been no tensions between the two communities for ages. He had even been offered the chance to stand for the board, but — again for fear of losing one half of his customers — he had so far always turned it down. Perhaps if they asked him again…
The sun was already quite warm on this spring morning, so the little groups chatting outside the prayer hall broke up slowly. It was a perfectly normal day all around, an apprentice was pushing a trolley-load of parcels to the post office, a drayman was heaving barrels from his cart, and in the middle of this sea of workaday bustle, two solemnly dressed men stood on an invisible island, holding by the hand two children in their party clothes, doffing their gleaming top hats in a gesture of farewell.
As they did so they revealed the little black caps that they wore under their hats, lest they stand disrespectfully bareheaded for as much as a moment. Arthur was almost the only one wearing an ordinary black hat. That was usual among bachelors, except that in this community very few men of his age were still bachelors. Even though he wasn’t a member, he had recently taken to accompanying Pinchas to the prayer hall on Füsslistrasse, where he was considered pious in his own way, because he was still often seen standing there even after the congregation had finished its prayer, eyes closed, apparently deep in worship. In reality Arthur was just mechanically turning the pages in the prayer book when his neighbours did the same, and using the murmuring regularity of the service to pursue his own thoughts, thoughts that turned in a circle, in an endless circle around the same central point that he didn’t dare to approach.
He had of course — it didn’t even have to be stated openly, so obvious was it — been invited to Pesach breakfast by the Pomeranz family. ‘The ladies won’t have waited for us,’ said Pinchas. ‘When Mimi is hungry, she is hungry, and Dr Wertheim says she should eat when she feels like it, she needs that in her condition.’ Arthur knew Dr Wertheim as an elderly colleague, who was particularly popular among patients who weren’t really ill, because he recommended spa cures rather than diets. Mimi’s ‘condition’, he assumed, would not be found in a medical handbook but was, in spite of all the strains that her late motherhood had brought with it, no more than a handy excuse to avoid unpleasant duties and always to do exactly what she happened to feel like doing. But he just nodded and said, ‘Maybe we could do a little detour. There’s something I’d like to show you.’
On the way to the other side of Bahnhofstrasse, of course, their conversation turned to Alfred’s surprising appearance at the Seder. It was one of those events that you have to bat back and forth over and over again until it has found its suitable place in the museum of family memories. ‘If I had been in Zalman’s place,’ Pinchas said, ‘I would have thrown him out. But I wasn’t the master of the house.’