The Emigrants

In an effort to resume a more factual tone after the little outburst she had permitted herself, Mme Landau told me that Paul's father, a man of refinement and inclined to melancholy, came from Gunzenhausen in Franconia, where Paul's grandfather Amschel Bereyter had a junk shop and had married his Christian maid, who had grown very fond of him after a few years of service in his house. At that time Amschel was already past fifty, while Rosina was still in her mid twenties. Their marriage, which was naturally a rather quiet one, produced only one child, Theodor, the father of Paul. After an apprenticeship in Augsburg as a salesman, Theodor was employed for a lengthy spell in a Nuremberg department store, working his way up to the higher echelons, before moving to S in 1900 to open an emporium with capital saved partly from his earnings and partly borrowed. He sold everything in the emporium, from coffee to collar studs, camisoles to cuckoo clocks, candied sugar to collapsible top hats. Paul once described that wonderful emporium to her in detail, said Mme Landau, when he was in hospital in Berne in 1975, his eyes bandaged after an operation for cataracts. He said that he could see things then with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him. In his childhood, everything in the emporium seemed far too high up for him, doubtless because he himself was small, but also because the shelves reached all the four metres up to the ceiling. The light in the emporium, coming through the small transom windows let into the tops of the display window backboards, was dim even on the brightest of days, and it must have seemed all the murkier to him as a child, Paul had said, as he moved on his tricycle, mostly on the lowest level, through the ravines between tables, boxes and counters, amidst a variety of smells — mothballs and lily-of-the-valley soap were always the most pungent, while felted wool and loden cloth assailed the nose only in wet weather, herrings and linseed oil in hot. For hours on end, Paul had said, deeply moved by his own memories, he had ridden in those days past the dark rows of bolts of material, the gleaming leather boots, the preserve jars, the galvanized watering cans, the whip stand, and the case that had seemed especially magical to him, in which rolls of Giitermann's sewing thread were neatly arrayed behind little glass windows, in every colour of the rainbow. The emporium staff consisted of Frommknecht, the clerk and accountant, one of whose shoulders was permanently raised higher from years of bending over correspondence and the endless figures and calculations; old Fraulein Steinbeiss, who flitted about all day long with a cloth and a feather duster; and the two attendants, Hermann Muller and Heinrich Miiller (no relation, as they incessantly insisted), who stood on either side of the monumental cash register, invariably wearing waistcoats and sleeve bands, and treated customers with the condescension that comes naturally, as it were, to those who occupy a higher station in life. Paul's father Theo Bereyter, though, whenever he, the emporium proprietor himself, came down to the shop for an hour or so (as he did every day) in his frock coat or a pin-striped suit and spats, would take up a position between the two potted palms, which would be either inside or outside the swing door depending on the weather, and would escort every single customer into the emporium with the most respectful courtesy, regardless of whether it was the neediest resident from the old people's home across the road or the opulent wife of Hastreiter, the brewery owner, and then see them out again with his compliments.

The emporium, Mme Landau added, being the only large store in the town and indeed in the entire district, by all accounts ensured a good middle class standard of living for the Bereyter family, and even one or two extravagances, as is evident (said Mme Landau) from the mere fact that Theodor drove a Diirkopp in the Twenties, attracting excited interest