down to it, he has little in common? Does he have to go into politics? Does he have to become so rich that he’s impossible to avoid? Does he have to become a member of the shopkeepers’ association that wouldn’t let his father become a member? What, he thinks, and that is the first question that he doesn’t imagine as rhetorical, what kind of person do I actually want to be? What am I? He lies in his bed, his arms stretched out beside him, and thinks about his mother.
A memory overwhelms him, so powerfully that he is surprised by the intensity with which it comes upon him. (Many years later it will happen again, in the shop, as he helps a woman tie up a new corset and bends forward to pull the laces tighter. In the waft of perfume that rises from her warm skin he is so overcome by the memory that he has to stay in that posture for a moment, bent at the hips, head lowered, till the intoxication passes.)
It is his mother that Jacob Noah remembers in his circle of light, the woman who had formed Jacob and his brother according to the ideal that she herself had never attained, the mother he remembers with the gnawing melancholy of a man who knows he misses what he never thought he would miss.
Rosa Deutscher had been the apple of her father’s eye, the man who had brought her up as a son. She had sat on his lap and learned to cut leather, sew gloves and sole shoes. Sitting beside him at the dinner table, she had followed his finger from right to left across the broken stones of the Hebrew script and like him she rocked gently back and forth to the sing-song of the text, until one day she read out the line before he had had a chance to speak it. By the age of thirteen she knew everything, and more, that a thirteen-year-old boy should know, except that she was a thirteen-year-old girl and couldn’t display her knowledge in the synagogue, but she sat beside her seriously listening father at the dining table, observed by her head-shaking mother, and read her text without mistakes. Her father rewarded her with a German grammar, and her mother shook her head again. ‘Know this, child,’ her father had said. ‘Know this. You can win or lose everything in life, but no one can take away from you what you know.’ And although he was to be proved badly wrong in this, little Rosa saw it as a self-evident truth and paid no heed to her hand-wringing mother, who said that knowledge was all well and good, but that a good dress was more valuable to a woman than a fat German book, and that conceited girls had difficulties finding a husband.
And so Rosa Deutscher married to avoid the problem of marriage, which was apparently a problem in the case of conceited girls like her. If one thing was clear, it was that you had to get married, sooner or later. The path towards better education, everything other than sewing and embroidering, was an impassable one, because untravelled by any woman anywhere, let alone the daughter of a Jewish shoemaker.
Abraham Noah had struck her as a suitable candidate, because he was busy climbing the ladder and consequently too preoccupied to bother himself with a woman who read books when there was no discernible need. And besides, she liked men with a purpose. If she couldn’t have a purpose herself, apart from being a good housewife and bringing an heir into the world, then for God’s sake let her have a chap with ambition.
His suitability had been made clear to her when she came and sat next to him in the tabernacle that her father had built in the courtyard at the back of the house. It had been a surprisingly mild evening, and lots of guests had come, because the Deutschers’ sukkah was one of the few in the town. They had nibbled on snacks and Noah had asked her permission to light a cigar. She had granted it, surprised at his casual insolence. It was clear that he had come along not for any religious considerations, but to honour her father’s tabernacle. Any credit that he might have been able to accrue by so doing had gone up in the smoke of his cigar, and that had amused her. She had gone indoors to fetch an ashtray, and when she came back and poured him a cup of mocha, she had asked him: ‘Tell me, Abraham Noah, what you do when you’re not sitting in tabernacles smoking cigars.’ He had laid the white cone of ash of his cigar in the ashtray, looked at her with a broad grin and said, ‘I work on my plan to shoe the feet of all the women in Assen.’ She looked at him for a moment. ‘All the women?’ she had asked. Her leg had involuntarily kicked slightly forward, only a little bit, just enough to free her boot from the rich folds of her skirt. And he, cigar in his mouth, had felt his eye drifting down, towards that boot, and he knew that from this moment onwards he would think only of her feet each time he picked up a shoe.
All the women of Assen? That was hardly realistic. Isaac Deutscher had his shop on the old cattle market, and many a time on a Friday evening, when the Sabbath had begun and his cares slipped from his shoulders, he’d pull his few remaining hairs from his head when he saw a Catholic or Protestant coming to his door under cover of darkness with a crackling paper bag to disturb his Sabbath rest. The bag contained the inevitable pair of shoes that had already been turned down by at least two other shoemakers, and was only good enough for ‘the Jew’. They didn’t buy new shoes from him. If that did happen, the purchaser took little delight in them, because at church on Sunday he would hear harsh words from a Catholic or Protestant shopkeeper, criticising his defecting client for his faithlessness. Catholics (insofar as there were any in this part of the county) bought from Catholics, orthodox Protestants from orthodox Protestants and the many liberal Protestants from the liberal Protestants, and although Deutscher was famous for his craftsmanship and quality, only Jews bought from him, and they were generally too poor for good new shoes.
‘All the women of Assen?’ Rosa had asked, there in the tabernacle, holding the coffee pot. ‘All the women of Assen,’ Abraham Noah had nodded with his impudent cigar in his mouth.
A man with a mission, she saw in him, a man who would give her a good house and the silk dressing gowns to which her mother was so devoted, and he would never complain as long as she could create the impression of being a good Jewish wife.
That hadn’t been hard for her. A year after the wedding, which was held less than six months after they met in the tabernacle, she gave birth to their first son, whom they named Jacob, and Heijman followed two years later.
And then, one quiet Friday evening, as they were celebrating Sabbath with her parents in the house above the shop, the doorbell was rung once again by a man with a paper bag containing two lumps that no one would ever have recognised as shoes. Abraham had stumbled downstairs and opened the door, and when he came back into the room where the pot of chicken soup stood steaming and the boys lolled sleepily in their high chairs while their grandfather tried to guide to their mouths pieces of challah that made the sound of a steam train on the way, old Deutscher lifted his head, looked at the brown paper bag and collapsed.
How old had he been, Jacob Noah, that evening when his father came into the room with a brown paper bag and his grandfather lowered his head and fell face-first into his grandson’s bowl of chicken soup? Four. Five. No older. But nonetheless: his first memory. His grandfather’s gleaming pate, surrounded by a grey ring of hair, in a bowl of soup.
And of course the chaos that immediately followed: his grandmother, her right hand thrown up over her mouth, her left hand on her chest, sinking down into her chair and only coming to when her daughter rubbed her wrists with vinegar; his father flying out of the door to fetch the doctor; his mother sitting her father upright, wiping his face clean and trying to drag him to the sofa, which didn’t work because the old man slumped against the back of his chair like a wet bag of sand. Heijman, two years old, crowing and exploiting the opportunity to lift his spoon and stoutly smack it into his plate of soup, and he himself, whether that was his memory or the desire to see things like this, looking at the scene, not knowing what was happening, but aware that it was something he would never forget.
Isaac Deutscher had never regained consciousness, and less than two weeks later he was laid to rest in the graveyard behind the Forest of Assen. The shop was taken over by his son-in-law.
Abraham Noah, who had learned the trade at fairs, and had good-naturedly held his ground there amongst drunken farmers’ boys and clog-footed milkmaids, went energetically to work. The shoemaking disappeared into the background, and he had a shop window made, in which the new goods were displayed on blue velvet, and two coloured prints hung