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Everything has its price, even prosperity wrought from diligent ambition and healthy common sense, and the price paid by Rosa Noah, née Deutscher, was the slow erosion of her once so promising marriage. Abraham, who had always prided himself on his modern, indeed: properly socialist ideas, was able to stomach his wife’s business success, where he himself had clearly failed, only with great difficulty. He became quieter, introverted, sullen. To compensate for the loss of his authority in the shop he became a domestic tyrant who from Friday evening, when he came back from his travels, until Monday morning, when he set off once more for a long and lonely week, had something to say about everything, complained about his wife’s meals and kept his two sons on such a short rein that they were visibly relieved when he left again. As happy and free as the atmosphere was during the week in the house above the shop, so it was suffocating and bleak at the weekend, when the brooding, sombre man who was their father and husband exerted his power over the family.
Although his mother, in spite of everything, seemed to be an alert and spontaneous woman, the realisation travelled all the way to Jacob, as he grew older, that she was actually two women. It was no more than a suspicion, a that-must-be-it, but he barely doubted it and his last doubt fled when he was woken one Saturday evening by banging and clattering and left his bed, with a mixture of unease and curiosity, to seek the source of the noise.
Upstairs everything was in darkness, and downstairs too, where the sitting-room door was open and the coals behind the mica window of the stove spread an orange glow. He opened the door of the kitchen and found nothing and no one. Finally he went, shivering on his bare feet, down the tiled corridor to the shoemaking workshop and the shop behind it.
In the workshop the faint light of a carbon-filament bulb still burned. The yellowish glimmer was a broad ribbon in the chink of the door. He laid his head against the doorpost, his heart thumping on the hard wood, and looked inside. On the workshop floor, in a white petticoat with big black stains, his mother knelt, her opulent dark hair loose, her face smeared. Her husband towered high above her, arms folded, face frozen. Suddenly, he must have shuffled or pushed against the door, perhaps it was his breathing, he saw his father’s back straighten. In a single motion he reached the door, threw it open and pulled the boy inside by his arm. ‘So,’ he said, setting Jacob down in front of him, hands heavy on his shoulders. ‘So, take a look, if you’re so curious. Look how your mother clears away her mess.’ Jacob tugged and pulled, but his father held him firmly in place, as his mother smiled at him as if none of it were of any importance, a little joke between husband and wife, and went on imperturbably with her work. He could do nothing but watch, even though he didn’t want to be there. Slowly, as he let his gaze rest on his mother and felt his father’s hands on his shoulders, he felt a distance within him, as if he was two people, one that watched and one that wasn’t there, didn’t belong there. It was just like the time his grandfather had slumped forward into his bowl of chicken soup, and he registered everything, perceived everything in a strangely distant way without really feeling part of it: Heijman banging his spoon into his bowl, his mother rubbing her mother’s wrists with vinegar, his father flying out of the door, and his grandfather’s slack corpse, the crown of white hair around his gleaming head, hanging backwards in his chair, swirls of vermicelli still in his face. He saw everything. Everything happened. But without him.
Chapter 4
So, eyeswideopen, in his bed, staring into the circle of light, Jacob Noah remembers his mother. Rosa, who was mockingly known as ‘Baroness von Münchhausen’ by her husband, because she had truly dragged the shoe shop out of the morass by her own hair. Rosa, who read to Jacob and Heijman in the evening, sitting between them in their bed and so tired that she sometimes fell asleep with the boys, one in each arm. Here, in the night-nightly warmth of pillows and blankets, Jacob Noah remembers the smell of her full hair that slipped from her bun and flowed in a cataract over her shoulders, the vague hint of eau de cologne at her neck, her irregular, superficial breathing. And the scent of her clothes in the warm bed, clothes in which the hours of the day had left their traces: leather, beeswax, coffee, her skin. It’s a confusing dizziness of smelt memories which, although he doesn’t know this yet, will visit him more often here in his bed than he would like. Yes, when he bends over the laces of a woman’s corset to fit it. And when he bumps into a young employee putting her hair up in the toilets. When he helps a mother who comes along with her daughter to buy her first bra (by now the shop is the biggest lingerie shop in the whole province) and she bends down to whisper something in Noah’s ear and from her thick brown hair, from the soft patches on either side of her throat, from her clothes, something escapes that goes to his head so powerfully that he has to apologise, before stumbling stiffly to the staff toilets to splash his face with cold water from the basin. Later, much later, when he is grown up and successful, he will become a man of myths and legends, someone to whom indescribable sexual proclivities and dark machinations are attributed, but by then he will have long been, to the very depths of his being, a man who is very much aware that he seeks only one thing: the fragrant embrace of his mother.
So, here, in his bed, in the watery morning light, Jacob Noah thinks about his formidable mother and asks himself out loud what he should have done.
Whenever he asked her how she had made a solid business out of a shoe shop that was doomed to failure, her answer had been that a person should improve not his strong points, but his weak ones. ‘Our weak point,’ she had said, ‘was that we didn’t want to be a shoemaker’s but a smart shop, and our strong point was that we were shoemakers and not shopkeepers.’
‘I thought,’ Jacob had replied, ‘that our weak point was that we were Jews.’
‘That too,’ she had said, with the resigned and weary smile of someone who knows that a person can only have so many victories in life. ‘That too, but at the time people were already breaking free of their churches. More and more liberals and socialists were coming. But the most important thing was the patience to realise a great plan step by step. Just as you don’t catch a woman by giving her a gold necklace straight away, Jacobovitz, so you don’t entice clients with the most beautiful and most expensive and most special things. You lay a foundation and you build on that.’
The foundation had been a rock-solid confidence in shoemaking. People who had come three times with old shoes, had seen the new shoes in the shop three times. The fourth time they bought theirs at Noah’s.
What, thinks Jacob Noah, as he leaves his bed and sets off for the bathroom, what then is my weak point and what my strength? And as he washes and shaves and dries himself and envelops himself in a dusty cloud of talcum powder, the merry-go-round of words and thoughts begins to whirl in his head.
In his mind the contours loom up of something so strange that he has to go and sit on the little stool in the corner of the bathroom once the picture comes clearly into focus.
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