‘… almost a shame that we can’t go into business together.’
The plot, Landolt explained, belonged to a family trust. He himself, and this had been stipulated, as the eldest of his generation, had sole discretionary power, he could sell if a sale seemed appropriate, but he had certain rules to observe.
Superannuated rules, perhaps, he wouldn’t argue about that right now, but none the less binding for that. And one of those rules — ‘It really is almost a shame!’ — was that one did not do business with people of the Mosaic faith.
‘Is it really laid down in those terms?’ François had asked.
And Landolt had studied his cigar, whose ember still didn’t strike him as perfect, and had replied, ‘There are things that you don’t have to write down.’
‘That’s the only reason? If I weren’t a Jew, would you sell me the property? At that price?’
‘In principle, yes.’
That had been the moment. The precise moment.
It was seven years ago now.
Already seven years.
There was suddenly a rotten smell in the air. Probably the rapeseed that was already blossoming in a field.
‘Drive faster, Landolt!’
It was the first time in his life that François had thought about his Jewishness, and he moved the vague sense of his membership of the community around in his personal accounts book, entering it now in one column, now in the other, and got a different result every time. He weighed up loyalty against usefulness, compared old habits with new opportunities and started one new calculation after another. Nothing like faith appeared in any of them, because he had never had faith. If such philosophical concepts had been part of his world, he would probably have described himself as an agnostic, someone who considers it a waste of time to ask questions for which there are no answers. According to ancient Jewish practice the name ‘God’ was never put down on paper out of sheer awe of the sacred, one writes ‘G-d’. For François, this traditional lacuna had always meant something quite different from respect: there was simply nothing there. Or to put it another way: everyone was free to put whatever they liked in the gap.
These were unfamiliar trains of thought for him. All through his life he had given more thought to his moustache — for years he had worn it short, no longer as striking as it had been in Baden — than to his religion. For him, being a Jew had been just as natural as the fact that he had brown eyes, or that his hair had turned grey far too soon.
It was just how it was.
But hair could be dyed, and he could hide his eyes behind a pair of glasses.
Mina had a paralysed leg, but as long as she stayed sitting on her chair, no one noticed.
Not that his Jewishness was the same as a handicap, of course not. But a handicap it sometimes was. The business with the plot of land was just one example among many. Situations had repeatedly arisen in which it would have been more useful to be called Huber or Müller. Things were easier for a Meier than for a Meijer.
And a Landolt could afford to do anything he liked.
A stone thrown up from the road struck the spokes of the back wheel. It sounded like a string breaking in a piano.
‘Be careful, Landolt!’
He didn’t talk to anyone about it, not even to Mina. Even though they’d been talking to each other more and more often for some time, and that had been unexpected. At the time he had married a dowry, and Mina had come with it, a bale of satin fabric with last year’s pattern that you have to take if you also want the fashion material currently in demand. Their marriage had been a business deal, an honest, clean transaction. She had acquired a husband, and he the chance to start a company at a young age. He had fulfilled his part, he had always been a decent husband, even though Mina, with her paralysed leg, wasn’t really presentable. If he cheated on his wife, he did it so discreetly that she didn’t have to notice if she didn’t want to. But then, very gradually, he had got used to her, the way people who keep pets get used to a dog; he had even started missing her if he came home and she happened not to be there.
At first he had only sometimes thought out loud, had summed up in words a problem or a decision that needed to be made, and he had certainly not expected a comment from Mina, let alone a solution. But Mina could listen the way other women play the piano or arrange flowers, she had turned it into an art form, so that when telling a story one found the answers one had been looking for all by oneself, before having them confirmed by Mina. She was a good person to talk to.
An outsider would probably have observed that in the course of his marriage François had gradually fallen in love with his wife, that familiarity had gradually turned to affection. But there was no more room for the word ‘love’ in François’s vocabulary than there was for ‘faith’ or ‘blind trust’. Human beings — and this reflection would also have been alien to the businessman François Meijer — can feel more than they can say.
He told her nothing about Landolt. Only that the purchase of the property had fallen through. But another solution would be found sooner or later.
There was nothing to discuss, either. For the time being he was only collecting information. Purely theoretically. Just in case. An imaginary manoeuvre, nothing more. A general doesn’t go straight into battle just because he’s working on a strategy.
Even the conversation with Pastor Widmer had been nothing more than that. A conversation, nothing more. Just because you’re talking to people doesn’t mean you’re making plans with them.
He had just happened by the church. If the property by Paradeplatz was not to be had, he would have to look for another one. He would have to stroll through the city without a precise goal in mind. Look at the people and see them as customers. Where did they keep going? Where did they stop? If you want to cast a net, you have to know where the fishes swim.
He had gone in purely out of curiosity. A tourist passing an interesting ruin in a strange city. He had never been inside a church before. It wouldn’t be all that different from a synagogue, but since there was one there… He just had time.
Entirely by chance.
His first impression was a great disappointment. He had always imagined a church as something magnificent, all colours and paintings and fragrances, but apart from the brightly coloured windows this was just a bare hall, high and narrow and forbidding, a building with pursed lips, you might say.
No incense in his nostrils, just dust and the waxy solution that was rubbed on the pews. It was how his schoolroom had smelled after the summer holidays.
You entered by a side door; they probably opened the main entrance only on Sunday. The first thing you caught sight of was a wooden stand holding texts and brochures. ‘Too many goods in too tight a space,’ François noted with a practised eye. Bad for profits. Over-filled shelves signal to the customer that there’s no special hurry to buy.
Grey unadorned walls, stone blocks that looked damp but weren’t. At the back a loft with organ pipes. No galleries to the side. Men and women weren’t separated here during the service.
François couldn’t imagine sitting next to Mina during prayers. But that was out of the question in any case. He was just here by chance.
Purely out of curiosity.
They didn’t have individual seats for the members of the congregation as they did in the synagogue, just long benches in which, François imagined, people probably came unpleasantly close to one another.