Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘Anne-Kathrin has blue eyes,’ thought Mimi, ‘but she isn’t an aristocrat. Certainly not an aristocrat.’

  ‘. . . but her features,’ repeated Janki, who had got lost in the novel’s meandering sentences, ‘sometimes showed, when she was tired or in a bad mood, an expression of almost wild brutality.’

  ‘Brutality?’ thought Mimi, and realised only from Janki’s reaction that she had said it out loud.

  ‘I haven’t translated it very well. In her it’s something positive. It means “strength” or “power”.’

  ‘That sounds better,’ thought Mimi.

  ‘. . . an expression of almost savage power, in which a physiognomist would probably have recognised the signs of profound egoism or a great lack of feeling. It’s hard to find the correct words,’ he added quickly. ‘It sounds far too crude in Yiddish.’

  ‘Go on!’ Mimi pleaded and when Janki bent obediently over the book once more she felt something almost like savage brutality within her.

  ‘Her face bore an unusual charm, her smile young and fresh, and her eyes filled with tenderness and flirtation. The blood of youth flowed warm and fast in her veins and lent her complexion, as white as camellia blossoms, a delicate pink tone.’

  ‘Camellia blossoms,’ Mimi thought and breathed in deeply. Hanging in the air of Endingen was the stench of the spring slurry that a farmer was spreading in his field. The bench in the gazebo was cobbled together from rough planks, the ground still covered with rotten leaves from the autumn, but Mimi lay stretched out on a sofa in an attic room, a gifted young poet sitting beside her, reading her poems that he had spent long nights writing, just for her.

  ‘Her hands were so weak, so tiny, so soft on his lips; those childish hands in which Rodolphe had laid his reawakened heart; those snow white hands of Mademoiselle Mimi, who would soon tear his heart in pieces with her rosy fingernails.’ Janki marked the spot with his own fingernail and snapped the book shut.

  ‘Go on reading! Please!’

  Janki shook his head, a gesture that Mimi sensed rather than saw. She had closed her eyes, and the warm spring sun stroked her lids.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Janki. ‘It’s not a book for young girls.’

  ‘I’m not a child any more!’ said Mimi, but not violently or challengingly as she did in her arguments with her parents, but quietly and with a hint of surprise.

  ‘It was just because the name reminded me . . . Mimi.’ She felt as if no one had ever called her by it. ‘But then you’re a Miriam.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure of that?’ The kitten stretched its limbs again. ‘If you breathe in deeply,’ Anne-Kathrin had advised her, ‘they look at your breasts.’ Mimi breathed in deeply. It sounded like a groan.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ asked Janki.

  ‘Only because you’re treating me like a little girl.’ She hadn’t had to think for a moment for that answer, and was very proud of herself. ‘How does the story go on?’

  ‘She leaves him.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And then she comes back to him. But it’s too late.’

  ‘Because she’s married to someone else?’

  Janki smiled. ‘Marriage . . . The book is called Scènes de la vie de bohème.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mimi said quickly, because it had dawned on her that a book deals with fantasy, while a marriage, particularly in Endingen . . . The shadchen Abraham Singer had been to see her more than once, but every time she had asked Golde to send him away. What did she want with cobblers’ sons and Talmud students? Gap-toothed Pinchas, the son of the shochet Pomeranz, made cow eyes at her every time he met her, and couldn’t say a word. That was why you needed books, because in them everything was different. Because in them the right man was suddenly at the door, and you just had to let him in. ‘Of course,’ she repeated, and felt very wicked. ‘Why should she marry?’

  ‘She gets involved with men,’ said Janki and looked her firmly in the eyes. ‘Because they give her presents.’

  ‘In the book?’

  ‘In the book. But that happens in reality as well. I have known such girls. The seamstresses at Monsieur Delormes . . . Your parents wouldn’t want me to tell you about it.’

  ‘My parents aren’t here,’ said Mimi.

  ‘No,’ replied Janki, ‘your parents aren’t here.’

  Salomon Meijer was away again to see to a cow. And Golde – who can count all the things a Jewish housewife has to do, a few days before Pesach? She had to get horseradish for the Seder plate and cover it with soil so that it would stay fresh and hot, she had to attend to the matzos, and she didn’t want, only lekoved Yontev, of course, to appear in the synagogue with the same ribbons on the same dress as last time.

  Chanele was alone at home when the master butcher Gubser appeared at the door, and at first she didn’t even hear his knocking. She had gone up to the attic to bring down the first box of Pesach crockery, and in passing – if she didn’t attend to it, who would? – it had occurred to her that the little room needed to be cleaned and aired again. It was a matter of urgency, too. If you pressed your cheek firmly onto the pillow, you could distinctly smell Janki’s male smells, of smoke and sweat and very slightly of cinnamon.

  The room had been tidied, but the yellow neckerchief with the knotted coins was nowhere to be seen. ‘He must have found a hiding-place for it,’ thought Chanele, and felt hurt, only for a moment, by such mistrust. The foreign uniform hung stock-straight from a hanger as if still standing to attention. Although Chanele had brushed it out and aired it outside for several nights, a smell still clung to it, probably the smell of war: hay, gunpowder and tobacco. If you closed your eyes . . .

  But Gubser was hammering more violently at the door now, with the heavy stick he always carried to drive on reluctant cattle, and which, if he met one of his good customers in the street, he liked to present as a rifle.

  He didn’t present arms to Chanele, he just gave a half-bow, impossible to tell whether it was meant politely or as an ironic insult and asked, ‘Is Herr Meijer not at home?’

  ‘They’re all out and about.’

  ‘I should have guessed. Busy people. Always busy. Like ants.’

  ‘Can I give him a message?’

  ‘That would be charming of you, lovely Fräulein, charming. I am most indebted to you.’ Gubser placed his hand on his chest, where something bulged over his heart, probably his money bag. ‘Tell him he is a clever man. What they say is quite correct: if a Christian is clever, he’s prudent, if a Jew is clever, he’s cunning. Tell him it worked.’

  ‘Shall I also tell him what worked?’

  ‘He’ll probably know that himself, won’t he? Perhaps he doesn’t want everyone to find out. Discretion is what they call it. Discretion. He is an intelligent man. Tell him to call in on me. I have something for him.’

  ‘What?’

  But Gubser only shook his head, bobbed again in a half-bow and was already walking down the street. Before he turned the corner into Badweg, he gave a little skip, as if on the dance floor.

  His path led him past the schoolhouse, where he saw Anne-Kathrin, that blonde with the heavy braids, sitting bent over a piece of embroidery in the bay of the schoolmaster’s house. It was a picturesque, very Swiss picture, and Gubser could not know that Anne-Kathrin had neither the patience nor the skilful fingers for such work, and had never finished a piece of embroidery in her whole life. She was only using a pretext to keep watch inconspicuously for her father, who had gone off once again for one of his healthy outings into the open countryside, at a marching pace and with his walking stick over his shoulder. If he came back earlier than expected, she had arranged with Mimi, Anne-Kathrin would immediately run to her own room, which opened out onto the garden and, at the open window, knock out the heavy winter clothes which, now that it was getting warmer, had to be packed up and locked away safe from the moths. The carpet beater, and they had tried it out, made a satisfactorily loud noise that could be clearly heard in the gazebo. />
  Just behind the gazebo there ran a hedge in which Anne-Kathrin had, while still a schoolgirl, discovered a gap, which she had for various reasons repeatedly extended. You could force your way through there, to a narrow path that led to the river, and if you didn’t forget to dab off telltale burrs from your dress, no one could guess how you’d got there.

  Janki had flicked on through the book and was now translating a passage in which Rodolphe’s enthusiastic eloquence ‘by turns tender, stirring and melancholy’ gradually won his Mimi over to him. ‘She felt’, Janki read, ‘the ice of apathy that had for so long kept her heart unfeeling, melting from his love. Then she threw herself at his chest and told him with kisses what she couldn’t say with words.’ He fell silent, and Mimi, whose head, she didn’t know how, had leant against his shoulder, made an impatient mewling noise.

  ‘L’aurore – how do you say aurore?’ asked Janki.

  ‘Sunrise,’ Mimi replied, and had to repeat the word several times. ‘Sunrise.’

  ‘Sunrise surprised them in a close embrace, eye to eye, hand in hand, and their moist, ardent lips . . .’

  It had, Mimi later said to Anne-Kathrin, really just been a fly, a fly far too early for the season, that had landed on her nose and startled her, just a desire to get rid of it and shake it off and if her lips had touched Janki’s mouth for a moment, had brushed against it only for a fragment of a second, it hadn’t been intentional, certainement pas and he had, unlike a young man from the village would have done, reacted like a cavalier, which is to say not at all, he had acted as if he hadn’t noticed anything, as if nothing at all had happened, and in truth nothing had happened, said Mimi to Anne-Kathrin, nothing at all, they had read a book together, that must surely be allowed, although her mother was always telling her off for her love of literature; if it was up to her, you were just supposed to waste away as a young girl.

  Anne-Kathrin agreed and asked her to give a very detailed account of what hadn’t happened, how Mimi had said ‘Pardon!’ quite calmly and coolly, as you do when you accidentally get too close to someone in the market, how Janki had only nodded, but how his eyes, those big, expressive eyes, had looked at Mimi – ‘like when someone’s thirsty, you understand?’ – and Anne-Kathrin understood very well and wanted to hear the whole story all over again, just to be able to confirm to Mimi that it hadn’t been a kiss, very definitely not a kiss.

  Janki didn’t read the sentence he had begun all the way to the end. He even left the book in the gazebo, and Anne-Kathrin later had to hide it under the pillow in her room. On the way home he walked beside Mimi like a stranger, a cousin beside a cousin that he doesn’t know any more than that. For a moment Golde had the impression they had had an argument, but she forgot the thought again straight away, because she was much more preoccupied with another matter: master butcher Gubser urgently wanted to talk to Salomon, and Salomon had no idea what it might be about.

  When Salomon arrived at Gubser’s house, the butcher was still at dinner. His wife, an angular person who had developed a mechanical precision in her movements from cutting sausages and weighing slices, opened the door to the dining room for him, where Gubser and three red-faced sons were bent over their plates. All four looked up only briefly, as they would have looked up briefly from their hymn books if someone had tried to push their way along the pew. Gubser was first to finish his dinner, wiped up the sauce with a piece of bread and then said, still chewing, ‘Ah, Herr Meijer! What a delightful surprise! Can I offer you something? A slice of ham, perhaps?’

  ‘You wanted to talk to me, I’ve been told.’

  ‘I did? I can’t remember. But please sit down, my dear, dear Herr Meijer. Are you sure you won’t do us the honour of having a little something? No? But you will have a drop of wine. Erika, a glass for our guest!’

  They weren’t playing the game for the first time. Master butcher Gubser knew very well that Salomon Meijer wasn’t permitted to eat anything or drink wine at his house, and his digs had no more meaning than the compliments that he added to the shopping of his lady customers like free soup-bones.

  ‘I don’t want to keep you for long,’ said Salomon. ‘I only came because I was told it was an urgent matter.’

  ‘Matter?’ Gubser repeated. He stretched the word out in a questioning tone as if he were hearing it for the first time. ‘What sort of matter would the two of us be . . .?’

  ‘Chanele says—’

  ‘Chanele?’ Gubser imitated Salomon’s singsong tone so convincingly that his three sons giggled into their plates. ‘Ah, the young lady who was so kind as to open the door to me. Quite pretty, if it weren’t for those eyebrows.’

  ‘She says you have something to give me.’

  ‘She must have misunderstood. Your people are supposed to be better at talking than listening, after all.’ The eldest Gubser son, who was in fact already an adult, laughed out loud, which his mother, without looking up, rewarded with an accurate clip around the ear.

  ‘Then please forgive me for troubling you.’ Salomon took the hat that he had been holding in his hand all that time and put it back on.

  ‘Not so fast, not so fast, dear Herr Meijer!’ Gubser wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat and got up. ‘Let’s go into the office. The boys don’t need to hear everything.’

  The room that Gubser called his office was a cramped room with small windows that barely let in any light, because they were hung all over with tin-framed crests. On the table a paraffin lamp illuminated a muddle of bills and letters, the individual stacks weighed down with slaughtering knives and other butchers’ utensils. On one of the stacks there was a heavy brass ashtray. Gubser – he had to squeeze in between the table and a standing desk with lots of drawers – sat down in a high-backed chair with carved legs, which would have looked more at home in an old castle than in a butcher’s house, and pointed to a matching stool. ‘Please!’

  ‘I’d sooner stand, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘I do mind, my dear Herr Meijer. You lot must learn to make yourselves comfortable.’

  Salomon sat down. As there was nowhere to put his hat, he hung it over the handle of his umbrella.

  ‘Yeeesss . . .’ Gubser leaned back in his chair, and hooked both thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. ‘A farmer,’ thought Salomon, ‘who has cattle for sale when everyone else has to buy. Someone who looks forward to haggling, because he will always win. He’ll be lighting a cigar next.’

  ‘You have one!’ said Gubser, holding out the wooden box. ‘Or is that forbidden too?’

  ‘It is permitted. But I don’t smoke. I take snuff.’

  The lighting of the crude cigar was a laborious process. Gubser riffled through a packet of letters, chose one, rolled it firmly together, held it over the lamp and then, puffing away, twirled the cigar around above the burning paper. ‘Yeeesss,’ he said again, when the operation was finally concluded to his satisfaction, ‘then let us try and discover how this misunderstanding came about.’

  ‘You were at our house this afternoon . . .’

  ‘Of course, of course. But even given the politeness for which your people are rightly renowned, I would not have expected you to pay me a return visit the same time.’

  ‘You sent me a message . . .’

  ‘You?’ The butcher grinned like someone approaching the punchline when telling a joke. ‘Herr Meijer!’

  Salomon stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Or should I say: Monsieur Meijer? What is he? A nephew, a cousin? You can never quite tell with you lot.’

  ‘Janki?’ A cattle trader only does good business if you can’t see what he’s thinking. At that moment Salomon was a very bad cattle trader.

  Gubser laughed loudly and complacently.

  ‘What do you want from Janki?’

  The master butcher narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, produced a series of fat smoke rings and watched them slowly floating apart in the gloom. It was only then that he replied, ‘I don’t know if I’m pe
rmitted to tell you this. You wouldn’t be too pleased if other people knew about your business deals.’

  Again Salomon gave no sign of his confusion. If someone wants to say something and is still playing coy, you will make him talk sooner with silence than with questions.

  ‘But on the other hand,’ Gubser said after a pause, ‘you are family. Or – what do you people call it? – mishpocha. All one mishpocha.’

  Salomon still said nothing.

  ‘This Janki is a good man. Still very young, of course, but not stupid. Not stupid at all. He will go far. Above all he has a good nose . . . That’s not supposed to be a double entendre, my dear Herr Meijer not a double entendre, for heaven’s sake. You know that I would never mock the physical properties of other people. Never. He has a very good nose for the right people. A better one than you, if I can put it as directly as that.’

  Salomon looked intently at a crest that showed half a red lily on the left and on the right a yellow field.

  ‘He came to me and made me a proposal. A rather surprising suggestion, but an illuminating one. That’s right, illuminating. It’s about horses. Horsemeat, to be precise.’

  Salomon hid his surprise behind a cough and waved the cigar smoke irritably away.

  ‘He made you . . .?’

  ‘You didn’t want to have me in the business, he told me. I don’t know why, when we have been working together, is this not so, dear Herr Meijer, so long and so well? You could easily have offered me the business with the contracts.’

  The auction in Saignélegier, Salomon had known for two days, had taken place. So why was Gubser in such a good mood?

  ‘How much?’ asked Salomon, and his attempt to show nothing but harmlessly polite interest was not very successful, ‘How much did you buy from him?’

  The butcher laughed so loudly that the cigar fell from his mouth, bounced off the bulge in his waistcoat and, spraying a little volcano of ash and ember, landed on one of the piles of papers. ‘Bought?’ he panted. The words bubbled up from his laughter, like gas bubbling from a bog. ‘I didn’t buy!’

  It turned out that Janki, after meeting Gubser, had visited him in his shop later the same day and made the same proposal that Salomon had so vehemently rejected: selling horsemeat on contract and then, after the price drop that might be expected, stocking up again much more cheaply. He didn’t yet have any contacts here, he had explained, so he needed a partner familiar with the branch. He was prepared to put some of his money at risk, and he had brought his capital with him – ‘knotted in a handkerchief, as gypsies do’. He had wanted to go fifty-fifty, but Gubser – ‘We’ve learned Jewish ways from you’ – had bargained him down to seventy-thirty; in the end he, the butcher, had had to do all the work. ‘And earned the wrath of my colleagues.’ It hadn’t been hard to find takers, and even easier for Gubser than it would have been for Salomon. He had claimed that he had speculated with his purchases, and now that temperatures had suddenly become so mild, the ice he needed for refrigeration was costing him a fortune. He had sold a lot, and impressed on each buyer that he was to discuss it with no one. ‘And they won’t, now that they’ve fallen for it. No one will want to look a fool in front of the others.’