No flowers adorn the graves in an orthodox Jewish cemetery and the dead, whatever their station, are laid to rest in simple coffins of unpolished wood, vested with no more riches than those with which they came.
Rachel’s son and the three Sandberg brothers who had loved her bore her to her resting place and lowered her into the earth.
The timelessness which David always experienced on religious occasions assailed him as he stood at the graveside between Sammy and Nathan. The grey, Mancunian sky above his head, the clay beneath his feet, the ancient Hebrew prayer the rabbi was intoning, would be unchanged by his brief span on earth. Only the earth’s inhabitants changed, playing their infinitesimal parts in the scheme of things between the coming and the going.
Nathan stood with his head bowed and David could feel the emotion emanating from him. Was it affecting him, too? Causing him to see his love or duty conflict in its true perspective? Would he let duty win because that was how it had always been for Jews?
Sigmund leaned heavily upon Abraham, his face distorted by silent grief; he was not a man to weep in public. Carl, too, contained his sorrow within himself. Only the sobs of Isaac Salaman, who always wept at funerals, and the guttural voice of the rabbi punctured the solemn peace.
David became aware of Sammy putting a shovel into his hands. Jewish tradition is literally to bury their own dead, every man present taking his turn to pile soil into the grave, in the order of his kinship to the departed.
Sigmund had been unable to cast more than one shovelful and was led away by Abraham. In lieu of blood relatives, the Sandbergs were next in line to Carl and the brothers helped him complete the harrowing task when everyone else had left.
“We’ve been like one family, Abie,” Sigmund said feelingly to his friend as they stood together on a grassy incline watching their sons.
“Even the quarrels. So what can you do?”
“The caring makes up for it. Come, we’ll say goodbye to her.”
The two ageing men walked slowly to the graveside.
David watched a bird soaring with timeless grace high above their heads as they made their final farewells.
Sarah had remained at the Moritzes’ home with Miriam and Helga. Esther and Bessie were there, too, and several neighbours and friends who had come to comfort Rachel’s daughters whilst they awaited the men’s return. Custom forbade the presence of females at a burial and the interment of a Jewish woman was never witnessed by her own sex.
Every mirror in the house had been covered with a white cloth as tradition decreed. The four low stools for the mourners were placed in a row beneath the window and candles burned in the brass candlesticks Rachel had brought from Vienna in 1904. The Yartzheit light in its thick, glass tumbler, which was her everlasting memorial, flamed too as it would throughout the Shivah and every year another would be kindled on the anniversary of her death.
Sarah and Esther had prepared the ritual meal Sigmund and his children must eat on the men’s return, though they would have no appetite. Hardboiled eggs which signified Life, salt herring symbolising tears and hard-crusted bagels, painful to swallow as the loss of a loved one, had been laid with primitive simplicity upon an upturned wooden box.
The black dresses Miriam and Helga wore had been jaggedly ripped at the neck with a knife by the rabbi, finalising their severance from the departed before she was carried from the house and Sigmund and Carl’s waistcoats had received the same treatment. The days of sackcloth and ashes were long gone, but the spirit remained.
Rachel’s old friends from Vienna, of whom she had seen little in recent years, were clustered around Helga.
“You don’t know how much we loved your poor, dear mamma,” Paula Frankl sobbed behind the veiling of her smart hat.
Helga remained silent, but thought a good deal. Like her mother, she had lost respect for them.
Miriam sat clutching Sarah’s hand. “You’ve been wonderful, Ma. I’ll never forget it.”
Sarah brushed the dishevelled black locks from the lined forehead which used to be smooth as silk. She had never before felt tenderness for Miriam, but it warmed her now. Was a death required to enable people to bury the past also? The coolness between herself and the girl who had loved one of her sons and married another had been mutual, as if they had never trusted each other. She put her arms around her daughter-in-law and let the new feeling merge between them, asking herself no more questions, content that it was there.
After the evening prayers, when only the family remained, Lizzie brought the younger generation to pay their respects, and consolation entered the house with them. The six children filed past the low stools, uttering the traditional greeting, “I wish you long life,” to each of the mourners in turn, as though the hands they were solemnly shaking belonged to strangers, not pillars of their own lives. Bessie’s maid, by now well primed in Judaism, had instructed them in what they must do and followed behind them to do so herself.
Martin and Marianne stayed beside Sigmund, who they sensed was the most in need of comfort.
“We’ll always remember her, won’t we, Marianne?” Martin promised him.
“And we’ve got something lovely to tell you, Zaidie Sigmund,” Marianne said nudging her cousin.
Martin put his lips to his grandfather’s ear and whispered the dream about Heaven to him, whilst Marianne looked on approvingly.
Sarah reflected on the closeness of these two grandchildren, the one resembling her dead friend, the other so like herself. Who needs a memorial light to be kindled for them once a year after they’ve gone? she thought feelingly. People lived on through those who sprang from their seed.
The children were quiet as mice and her youngest grandchild Ronald, who was the image of his Uncle Nat, came to nestle on her lap as the room grew still. Her fingers strayed to her brooch in the pensive silence and found a tiny dent in the delicate filigree which had worn thin with age. Tonight was Life’s bitterness, but the sweetness would come again and then more sorrow, repeating the pattern relentlessly. Whatever the future held they would survive as they always had, strong, because they were together.
“What are you thinking about, Bobbie?” Marianne asked her softly.
How could she put it into words for this child who wanted to know everything? She glanced around at the faces she loved. A seed could take root anywhere, hadn’t the Sandbergs and Moritzes proved it? And flourish anew, multiply itself, nurture its growth in alien soil yet still retain the God-given specialness which made it uniquely of one tree. “The way it is with a Jewish family,” she replied.