Every time he died, he came back.

On the last day of the week of mourning, when the loss had dispersed into the everyday, when you had to make a special effort to seek out the pain, a gnat-bite which stung yesterday and which you hardly feel today, his back aching from sitting on the low stools assigned by ancient custom to the bereaved for those seven days, there he was again as if it were the most natural thing in the world, walking inconspicuously into the room with the other visitors, indistinguishable from them in outward appearance. But he brought no food with him, even though that would have been the custom. In the kitchen the pots and covered bowls waited in line, a guard of honour for the deceased; he came empty-handed, took a chair, as one does, said not a word unless addressed by the other mourners, stood up when they prayed, sat down when they sat down. And when the others, murmuring their words of condolence, took their leave, he simply stayed on his chair, he was there again, as he had always been there. His smell of damp dust mingled with the other smells of the house of mourning, sweat, tallow candles, impatience; he was part of it again, he joined in the grieving, took leave of himself, sighed his familiar sigh, which was half a groan and half a snore, fell asleep with his head drooping and his mouth open, and was there again.

Salomon Meijer rose from his stool, lifted his body up like a heavy weight, like a quarter of a cow or a mill-sack of flour, stretched so that the joints in his shoulders cracked, and said, 'So. Let us have something to eat.' He was a tall, broad man, and the only reason he didn't create an impression of strength was that his head was too small for his bulk, the head of a scholar on a peasant's body. He had grown side-whiskers which were in places – far too early, Salomon thought – already turning white. Beneath them, framed by his beard, a network of little burst veins formed two red patches that always made him look tipsy, even though he only drank wine for the festive kiddush, and otherwise one or two beers at most on very hot days. Anything else befogs the head, and the head is the most important part of a cattle dealer's body.

He dressed entirely in black, not out of mourning, but because he couldn't imagine wearing another colour; he wore an old-fashioned frock coat of heavy cloth which, since no more visitors were expected, he now unbuttoned and dropped to the floor behind him without looking round. He assumed that his Golde would pick up the frock coat and lay it over the arm of a chair, and there was nothing tyrannical about it, only the naturalness of spheres clearly assigned. He straightened his silk cap, a superfluous gesture, since it had not slipped for years, for no unruly hair grew on Salomon Meijer's head. Even as a young man his friends had called him Galekh, the monk, because the bald patch on his head reminded them of a tonsure.

On his way to the kitchen he rubbed his hands, as he always did when food was in store; as if he were already washing his hands, even before he had reached any water.

Golde, Frau Salomon Meijer, had to lift her arms over her head to shake out the frock coat. She was short, and had once been delicate, so delicate that in the first year of their marriage a jocular habit had come about, one which no outsider understood or even so much as noticed. When, at the beginning of the Sabbath, Salomon uttered the biblical verse 'Eyshes chayil, mi yimtza' in praise of the housewife, he paused after the first words and peered questingly around, as if he had said not 'Who can find a virtuous woman' but 'Who can find the virtuous woman?'. Long ago, having married young and fallen in love young too, every Friday he had accompanied the words with a pantomime, looking with exaggerated foolishness for his fine little wife, and had then, having found her at last, drew her to him and even kissed her. Now all that remained of that was a pause and a look, and if anyone had asked him why he did it, Salomon Meijer himself would have had to ponder.

Golde had grown fat over the years, she hurried stoutly through life, a hasty peasant sowing seeds, she wore her dress with the black silk ribbons as a pot wears a tea-cosy, and her reddish sheitel, even though it was made by the best wig-maker in Schwäbisch Hall, sat on her head like a bird's nest. She had developed the habit of pulling her lower lip deep into her mouth and chewing on it, which made her look toothless. Sometimes it seemed to Salomon as if at some point – no, not at some point, he had to correct himself – as if, after that lengthy and painful childbed, after those uselessly wailed-through nights, a young woman had left him and a matron had taken her place. But he could not reproach Golde for that, and he who finds a virtuous woman, as the Bible says, has gained riches beyond rubies. He said it every week, paused and looked searchingly around.

The frock coat now hung over the arm of the leather armchair in which Salomon liked to rest after a long day on the country road, but which today he had offered to the rebbe, Rav Bodenheimer. Now the chairs had to be lined up in a row again, order had to be re-established around Uncle Melnitz, whose chin hung on his chest as if he was dead.

'Well? I'm hungry!' cried Salomon from the kitchen.

Usually, or rather whenever the man of the house was not away on business, the Meijer household ate in the front room, which Mimi liked to call the 'drawing-room', while her parents called it the 'parlour' plain and simple. Today the big table in there had been pushed up against the wall, so that the Shabbos lamp hung in the void, they had had to make room for the visitors, a lot of room, because Salomon Meijer was a respected man in Endingen, a leader of the community and administrator of the poor box. Anyone who had raised a glass of kirschwasser 'to life' at his Simchas also came to him at a shiva to pay his respects, not least because one could never know when one might need him. Salomon acknowledged this without reproach.

So for once they ate in the kitchen, where Chanele had already got everything prepared. She was a poor relation, said the people in the community, even though the old women most skilled in Mishpochology were unable to say exactly which branch of the Meijer family tree she might have sprouted from. Salomon had brought her back, more than twenty years ago now, from a business trip to Alsace, a wailing, wriggling bundle, swaddled like a Strasbourg goose. 'Why would he have taken her in if she hadn't been related to him?' asked the old women, and some of them, whose teeth had fallen out and who therefore thought the worst of everyone, suggested with a significant nod of the head that Chanele had exactly the same chin as Salomon, and that one might wonder what had taken him to Alsace so often in those days.

The truth of the matter had been quite different. The goyish doctor had explained to Salomon that the son that they had had to dismember to get him out of his mother had torn Golde so badly that she would not survive another difficult birth; he should be grateful that he had at least one child, even if it was only a girl. 'Thank your God,' he had said, for all the world as if there were several of them, and as if they had divided their responsibilities among themselves as clearly as the duty physician and the cattle vet.

Now everyone capable of thinking practically knows that one child on its own makes far more work than two, and when on one of his trips the opportunity presented itself – a mother had died in childbed and her husband had lost his mind over it – Salomon intervened with an investment as practical and unsentimental as buying a calf cheap and feeding it up until it paid for itself several times over as a milk cow.

So Chanele was not a daughter of the house, but neither was she a serving-girl; she was treated sometimes as one and sometimes the other, she was in no one's heart and no one's way. She wore clothes which she sewed herself or which Mimi didn't like any more, and her hair was hidden away in a net, as if she were a married woman; she who has no dowry need not stay on the look-out for a husband. When she laughed she was even pretty, except that her eyebrows were too broad, they crossed through her face as one crosses through a calculation that is wrong or has been dealt with.

Chanele had laid the meal out on the kitchen table. There had been nothing to cook, because food is brought to a shiva to spare the mourners the task. Even so, a powerful fire was blazing in the stove, crackling fir logs that quickly gave off their heat. It was still freezing outside at night, although they would already be celebrating Seder in two weeks; Pesach fell early that year, 1871.

'So?'

When Salomon Meijer was hungry, he grew impatient. He sat at the table, hands left and right on the wood, as the mohel lays out his instruments before a circumcision. He had already said HaMotzi, had sprinkled salt over a bit of bread, said the blessing over it and put it in his mouth. But after that he had not gone on to help himself, because he placed value on everyone sitting with him at table when he was, after all, at home. He could eat alone any day of the week. Now he drummed his right hand on the table-top, repeatedly lifting his wrist in rhythm, as musicians do when they wish to demonstrate their skill to the audience. His fingers danced, although it was not a cheerful dance, one that might easily, in a public house, have led to a fight.

Mimi came in at last, with a theatrically tripping step designed to demonstrate how much of a hurry she was really in. Although there was no real need, she had changed her clothes again, and was now wearing a mouse-grey dressing gown, slightly too long, so that the hem dragged along the stone floor. 'Those people,' she said. 'All those people! Isn't it ennuyant?'

Mimi loved precious words, as she loved everything elegant, she picked them up in goyish books that she borrowed secretly from Anne-Kathrin, the schoolmaster's daughter, and scattered her everyday conversation with them as if they were gold-dust. Inclined as she was towards refinement, she didn't like the fact that everyone still called her Mimi, a children's name that she had long – 'Really, Mamme, for ages now' – outgrown. At fifteen, and nobody could remind her of this for fear of provoking a storm of tears, she had once flirted with Mimolette, and Salomon, never averse to a joke, had actually called her that for a few days, before confessing with a laugh that in France it was the name of a cheese. Since then she had tried to gain acceptance at least for Miriam, which was her actual name, but had been unable to do anything about the old family habit.

Mimi had everything a beauty needs, immaculate white skin, full lips, big brown eyes that always glistened a little mistily, long, softly wavy black hair. But for some reason – she had spent hours at the mirror and been unable to find an explanation for it – the perfect individual parts didn't really fit together where she was concerned, just as a soup sometimes simply refuses to taste right despite being made of the best ingredients. She gave no sign of this self-doubt, tending on the contrary to behave in an arrogant and even patronising manner, so much so that her mother had asked her more than once if she actually thought she was Esther out of the Bible, waiting for messengers, in search of the most beautiful virgins, to come to Endingen to bring her to their king.

Now the four of them were sitting around the table. There were bigger families in the community, but when Salomon Meijer considered his loved ones like this, he was quite content with what God had given him, a very practical contentment based on the fact – and who knows this better than a cattle dealer, who gets around the place? – that he could have been much worse off.

There was, as there always is after shivas, far too much food on the table. Three bowls alone of chopped boiled eggs, half a salted carp, a plate of herrings, but just a few, meagre herrings, for red-haired Moische was a stingy man, even though he had had a sign painted for his shop that was bigger than the premises itself. It was customary simply to put down the food one had brought, without a name and without a thank-you, but people knew the patters of the plates, knew to whom which crockery belonged – otherwise, how could they have given it back the next day? The pot of sauerkraut, it wouldn't even have taken the broken handle to know, came from Feigele Dreifuss, known to everyone only as Mother Feigele, because she was the oldest in the village. Every autumn she made two big vats of sauerkraut with juniper berries, even though there had been no one in her house to eat it for a long time now, and then gave it away at every opportunity, brought it to women in childbed to strengthen them, and to the bereaved to comfort them.

On the sideboard, wrapped in a newspaper and shoved into the furthest corner like stolen goods, lay a plaited loaf, a beautiful berches scattered with poppy-seeds, which they would inconspicuously remove from the house tomorrow and feed to the ducks and hens. Christian Hauenstein, the village baker, in whose ovens they baked all their Shabbes loaves and warmed their Shabbes kugels, had sent it, of course without coming by himself. He was a modern man, a free-thinker, as he liked to stress, and wanted to prove to his Jewish customers that he valued them and nurtured no prejudices towards them. No one had ever had the heart to tell him that they couldn't eat his well-intentioned loaves because they weren't kosher.

But who needs bread when there's cheesecake on the table? Above all when it's the legendary cheesecake that only Sarah Pomeranz could bake. Naftali Pomeranz, whose very name revealed him as an incomer, might have been an important man, a slaughterer and a synagogue sexton, shochet and shammes, he even seemed to want to found a dynasty in these offices, and his son Pinchas, whom he was training up as his successor, was as skilled at delivering a clean slice to the throat as his father, but it was still Sarah who ensured the true reputation of the family with her cake, a masterpiece, everyone agreed, so good 'that Rothschild himself could not eat finer', and that was the highest accolade that the village could supply in matters culinary.

Salomon had asked for a second piece to be put on his plate, and chewed with pleasure as Golde, who was not made for sitting still, wondered, with her lower lip sucked in, what should be transferred to which bowl so that all the alien crockery could be washed clean and returned. Mimi toyed with a little piece of cake that she divided with her fork into ever smaller halves, while making the discreetly disgusted face of a doctor forced by his profession to conduct an unpleasant operation.

'Tomorrow I must leave the house at four,' said Salomon. 'You can wrap up all the leftover cake for my journey.'

'Almost all. A piece must be left for me.' Chanele, whose uncertain position in the household had made her a good observer, knew precisely when she could risk such pert little remarks. Now Salomon had eaten well; that meant that he was in a benevolent mood.

'Nu, so be it, part of the leftovers.'

Mimi pushed away her crumbled cake. 'I don't know why you all like it so much. It tastes ordinaire.' She spoke the word with lips pursed, to stress the Frenchness of the word.

Golde took the plate, looked at it darkly – 'the waste!' her expression said – and put it with the other crockery that Chanele would later wash up. 'Where are you off to tomorrow?' she asked her husband, not out of genuine interest, but because an eyshes chayil asks the right questions.

'To Degermoos. The young farmer, Stalder, has said he wants to talk to me. I can imagine what it's about. He's running out of hay. He wouldn't believe me when I told him he's putting too many cows out on his poor land. Now he wants me to buy them back. But I'm not buying. Who needs cows when the grass isn't growing yet?'

'And that's why you're going? Not to do a deal?'

'Not this deal. There's someone in Vogelsang with cow-pest in his herd. He has too much hay. I'll tell Stalder, and he can stock up.'

'What do you get out of it?'

'Nothing today. And perhaps nothing tomorrow, either. But the day after tomorrow ...' Salomon ran his fingers through his sideburns, because of the cake-crumbs and because he was pleased with himself. 'Sooner or later he'll have a beheimes to sell, and it'll be an animal that I can use. I'll make him an offer, and he'll take it because he'll think to himself: "The Jew with the brolly is a decent fellow." And then I will do my deal.'