Second Violin Read Online Free PDF

– trading with them wasn’t.
    ‘Mind,’ the man said at last, ‘a trade discount wouldn’t come amiss. What’s your usual price?’
    ‘For a suit like this? Seventy-five schilling.’
    ‘Sixty-five?’ the man ventured.
    Hummel had been about to say fifty-seven-fifty.
    ‘Done,’ he said softly. ‘What name?’
    ‘Trager. Joe Trager. I’m a Joe just like you.’
    Hummel doubted that the word ‘like’ could ever reasonably be used to compare the two of them but said, ‘How do you know my name is Joe? Do you have records on us
all?’
    ‘Records? O’ course we got records. We got files a foot thick. But they don’t get shown to the likes of me. I’m just a regular Fritz, I am. A professional soldier. Never
been more than a private and I shouldn’t think I ever will be. No, I seen it over your shop – “Josef Hummel & Son”.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Hummel. ‘Josef Hummel was my father. I am merely “& Son”.’
    Trager laughed as though Hummel had just told him the funniest thing he’d heard since the Anschluss. He was still laughing when Hummel handed him his receipt, still laughing as he slipped
his uniform back on and went out into the night with his blue suit in a brown paper parcel tied up with string. The notion of hubris left Hummel. It was indeed an odd normality.

 
§ 14
    25 April
Leopoldstadt
    The normal came to claim him with a calendrical regularity. Passover. The first under the iron heel.
    Hummel had the merest adherence to faith. He had endured his bar mitzvah out of loyalty to his father, a man not long widowed, but once it was done the old man had not pressured him, nor
even expected him to attend the synagogue. If Hummel went, as on occasion he did, it was for the merely aesthetic pleasure of chanting and architecture, much as he might go to the theatre. Indeed,
that was how he thought of services in a synagogue, second-rate theatre – second-rate but free. Passover brought obligations. Krugstrasse could not cope with an atheist, hence his neighbours
ignored Hummel’s lack of faith, any faith, and thought of him merely as neglected, inattentive, and were it not for his industrious tailoring, lazy. Hummel was not allowed to escape the feast
days that mattered nothing to him by those to whom they did matter – and, out of nothing more than good manners, he accepted invitations from most of the families in the street in the years
following his father’s death. A Passover tradition is to invite a stranger into a family occasion. So it was that at Passover 1938 he found himself at Beckermann’s for the family seder , presided over by old Beckermann in a dining room crammed with his descendants . . . sons, daughters and grandchildren . . . fourteen people seated in a room that might have served
Baron Rothschild as a broom closet.
    Hummel had always liked the room. After his mother’s death, housekeeping in the Hummel household had been no more than perfunctory. If something other than the functional wore out, it was
thrown away and not replaced. It was worth going to a seder just to eat off a tablecloth, since, left to themselves, neither he nor his father would have bothered. It gave Hummel a pleasure
that was wholly secular to sit in the overplush, nineteenth-century velvet drape and tassel clutter of the first-floor front room over Beckermann’s shop. Portraits, single and group –
scarcely a space on the wall to hang one more – more beards, more Franz-Josef moustaches, and a Darwinian likeness between them all that came close in Hummel’s mind to abolishing
notions of individuality. It was a visit to ur-Beckermann, to an amorphousness, that beckoned, swallowed and failed to consume. It was the kind of room he had lived in for the first ten years of
his life, while his mother lived and a woman’s touch had turned the plain boxiness of the room into a magician’s cube, a chinese box, far from plain, layer upon layer of memory and
history. The tangibility of