Second Violin Read Online Free PDF Page B

trivia. Every photograph a name, every name a story. It was a journey to the public places of the heart, back into childhood. And childhood was a place well worth
visiting – once in while.
    For once the elder’s prayer struck Hummel as being more acute than the mereness of analogy. For once it had teeth and it bit. Holding up a tray of matzohs, old Beckermann recited in
Aramaic the prayer of deliverance: ‘This is bread of affliction, that our fathers ate in Egypt. Those who are hungry let them come and eat; those who are needy let them come and celebrate
Passover with us. We are here now, in the year to come we may be in Israel. We are slaves now – in the year to come we may be free.’
    Fat chance, Hummel thought.
    Beckermann turned to the youngest in the room, his grandson, eleven-year-old Jonny – younger brother of Adam, the one who had been beaten up by the SA just before the Nazi conquest, and
who still bore a livid blue scar across his forehead.
    ‘Jonathan – the four questions.’
    The boy knew what was required of him. He’d done this since he was seven. At that age Hummel too had been often called on to ask the same four questions. All he had to do was ask about the
oddness of the meal, the things on the silver seder plate in the middle of the table – herbs and matzohs , chicken bones and a mish-mash of apple and walnut that Hummel always
thought looked like a Waldorf salad gone wrong. The questions served as prompts for the old man to bang on again about slavery and Egypt and deliverance . . . lest we forget. Hummel had long ago
concluded that the point of being a Jew was that you were never allowed to forget anything.
    Jonny said, ‘Zayde . . . why have we not risen up and kicked out the Nazis?’
    The boy’s mother whispered none too softly in his ear.
    The boy replied loudly, ‘I know, I know. Didn’t you hear me last year? I know the answers to the four questions. Zayde was kind enough to tell me then. Now there are new
questions.’
    Beckermann was flummoxed – he had the routine off pat and was all but incapable of improvising. There were no new questions. It had been done this way for the best part of three thousand
years. Beckermann’s daughter-in-law was angry – her son also had it off pat, and it was not something that required thought or criticism. Beckermann’s grandson was, however,
resolute.
    ‘Will God deliver us from this evil, Zayde, as he did in Egypt? I only ask because if he takes as long as he did in Egypt there may be none of us left to be safely led into the land of
milk and honey.’
    A vein in Beckermann’s forehead had turned purple-ish and was beginning to throb. But he said nothing. His daughter-in-law, all of sixteen stone, grabbed the boy, well under five feet tall
and less than six stone, and bundled him out. Silence reigned. Hummel thought Beckermann was only seconds away from weeping. Still he did not speak. Then Adam Beckermann, seventeen, tall and
skinny, got up from his seat, slipped off his yarmulke and spoke.
    ‘Grandfather, I can no longer pray for our deliverance, prayer is pointless. God has gone deaf, either that or he is dead . . . I can no longer pray for our deliverance, but I’ll
fight for it.’
    The yarmulke thrown down landed on the seder plate, knocking over the chopped parsley and bitter herbs. Adam’s father, Beckermann’s third son, Arthur, shot bolt upright
from his seat and bellowed the one word ‘Adam!’ But the boy was gone. Beckermann wept. Hummel slipped out quietly, unnoticed he hoped, from the ruins of the seder . It was not the
last he was ever invited to, but it was the last he ever went to.

 
§ 15
    2 June
Berggasse
    The Freuds were travelling light. Sigmund, Martha, their children, his sister-in-law, two maids and a doctor, the dog – and the furniture. The furniture was travelling
separately. The furniture included some three thousand Greek and Roman figurines and sixteen hundred books. The furniture