He had wanted to bring his share of the profits, calculated cleanly, or, as Gubser put it, in a correct and Christian manner, to Janki today, and he was sorry, terribly sorry, that he had caused this stupid misunderstanding and startled Salomon like that. ‘You probably didn’t even come for dinner. Can’t I offer you something anyway? Really not?’
But perhaps, said Gubser, and looked for the next letter to relight his extinguished cigar, perhaps dear Herr Meijer would be kind enough to take the money to his nephew, or whatever the relationship between the two of them was, it was ready here in the office, and a decent businessman, strange as it might seem to Herr Meijer, didn’t sleep easily when they hadn’t paid their debts.
Gubser stood up and pushed his way past the edge of the table. He pulled open one drawer of the standing desk after the other while waving his other hand apologetically behind his back, which was probably supposed to mean: ‘You must forgive a person who is involved in as many business deals as I am, if he can’t remember every single insignificant detail all at once.’ Bending lower he stretched his bottom out towards Salomon. The beginning of a wide, red-and-white striped pair of braces peeped out from below his waistcoat.
‘Oh, that’s it!’ he said at last, in a voice that reinforced Salomon in his conviction that all this searching was a piece of theatre that he was staging for some unfathomable reason. Gubser straightened with a groan – he groan didn’t sound convincing either – and held out a packet wrapped in wax paper to Salomon, with both hands, as if it was too heavy to carry it otherwise. The packet was tied tightly and the knot reinforced with a lump of sealing wax, so thick that it would have been enough for ten letters.
‘Here!’ A good deal for your relative. We could have done the same thing, just you and me. We wouldn’t have needed him at all. I might even have given you forty per cent rather than only thirty. But you wouldn’t have had sufficient trust in me. A poor knowledge of human nature, Herr Meijer. A very poor knowledge of human nature.’
When Salomon handed the packet to Janki, he didn’t react. He went up to his attic room to check the contents, came back down as if nothing particular had happened, and didn’t even want to notice the curious faces of the others. He sat down with them at the table, ate herring and potatoes, drank tea, passed the bread when asked to do so, and it was only sometimes – although perhaps Mimi was imagining it – that he didn’t immediately notice when someone had asked him a question, and in order to reply he had to bring himself back from somewhere. ‘It must have something to do with the book he was reading to me from,’ she thought.
Golde held her knife and fork in her hands, two strange pieces of equipment whose purpose she couldn’t quite explain to herself, sucked her lower lip deep into her mouth and was chewing around on it. ‘There’s something different about him,’ she thought. ‘If he was my own son, would I know what it was?’
‘He’s a man and not a boy,’ Chanele thought and remembered the smell of the uniform.
‘I shouldn’t have taken him in,’ thought Salomon.
Janki pushed his plate away from him and suddenly smiled. ‘Is our neighbour Oggenfuss actually a good tailor?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ll have a new pair of trousers made for Pesach.’
6
Three months later Janki had a shop.
He didn’t set it up in peasant Endingen, where the Jews lived, as they did in Lengnau, not because the air was so healthy there, but because they hadn’t been granted permission to live anywhere else in the Confederation, no, Janki set up his shop in Baden, which wasn’t exactly Paris either, it wasn’t even Colmar, but it wasn’t a village, it was a small town whose inhabitants were interested in things other than the milk yields of their cows and the harvest from their fields.
The cellar, which in everyone’s opinion he had rented at too high a price – ‘I could get five byres for the same money!’ said Salomon – wasn’t very spacious. What Janki called ‘just right for an exclusive clientele’ was in Salomon’s words as cramped as shul on Yom Kippur, when everyone forces their way in to clear their debts with God. You might serve perhaps two or three customers in there in elegant intimacy, but it was already getting too cramped for a fourth, and a fifth, if there ever was one, would have to wait pressed against the wall until room came free at the counter. Of course, Janki would have had more surface area for his money in a less prominent situation, but the Vordere Metzggasse, situated between the Weite and the Mittlere Gasse, was the precise spot that he wanted. ‘If you want to impress people,’ he said, ‘you have to be on the Rue de Rivoli and not in some faubourg or other,’ an opinion with which Mimi keenly concurred, even though she knew neither where the Rue de Rivoli was, nor what a faubourg might be. Salomon refused to be convinced, and insisted that where he was concerned, he wouldn’t pay a higher price for a cow ‘just because it shits on gilded straw’. Nonetheless, even if he would never have admitted it, he was starting to like Janki. There weren’t many people who knew what they wanted.
One further disadvantage of Janki’s new shop was the fact that both spaces had served as a grocer’s store-room, and more particularly for his spices. Janki did engage a painter, and even had him come for a second time for good money, but the heavy aroma of ginger, cardamom and nutmeg resisted all attempts to dispel it, dug its way into cracks and crannies from which, particularly on hot days, it crept unsuspected and settled especially in the doors that Jani had fitted over his fabric shelves, so that he could dramatically display his goods by parting the curtains. Even decades later the smell of gingerbread and ginger nuts still reminded many of the residents of Baden of being led by their mother’s hand to Frenchman Meijer’s shop.
Janki also, after a detailed consultation with Red Moische, had the same painter who had painted the walls make a store sign, French Drapery Jean Meijer. As he had little room at his disposal on his narrow part of the façade, the letters were not as big as Janki would have wished, and for the same reason he did not take Moische’s advice to leave a little space on the right so that he could later add the words and Sons. But there was one thing that Janki did not want on any account to do without: a coat of arms decorated with a little crown, like the ones that court suppliers had on their signs. As a sign for his coat of arms he ordered an orb, the result of which, dashed off unlovingly by the artist, looked more like an etrog, the citrus fruit needed for the rituals of the Feast of Tabernacles.
Even though the grocer would have let him have his own at a good price, Janki had a new counter made, wide enough for him to roll out a length of fabric on it. When the counter arrived, he locked himself in for a whole day and repeatedly practised a gesture that he had admired in Monsieur Delormes; he had had the knack of swirling the massive wooden pole the bale was rolled around through the air without any apparent effort, until the fabric assumed its own weightless life and floated towards the customer with metropolitan elegance. ‘You must feel the dress just by looking at the fabric,’ Monsieur Delormes had always said.
Janki had his first fabrics brought from Paris. As the cost of the shop’s conversion had exceeded his budget, and he had to request a loan as an unknown businessman, there was so little that the doors over the shelves served to hide the gaps rather than present the goods on offer. The selection could have been much bigger had Janki not insisted on having only the choicest materials on offer but, Mimi explained to her hopelessly old-fashioned father, ‘If you want to have the best customers, you must offer the best goods.’ Along with the order, Janki had sent a letter to be passed on to Monsieur Delormes, in the hope that the famous man might give him a letter of recommendation which, printed in the Badener Tagblatt, would certainly make a big impression on the public. So far no answer had arrived, so that Janki had to settle for advertisements and notices, which he signed, ‘Jean Meijer, formerly of the most important fashion houses in Paris’.
In spite of his new status as boss of his own company, Janki still lived in his attic room in Endingen. Golde wouldn’t have a
llowed anything else, and with all the expenditure required by the shop, a flat of his own would really have been a needless waste of money. Every morning before six o’clock, without breakfast and with only a piece of bread in his pocket, he walked the two-hour journey to Baden; he had learned how to march, after all, and it was also, he explained, much easier, ‘when you know that what awaits you at your destination is not a battle, but at worst a skirmish with a painter or a cabinet maker’.
On the long-awaited day of the opening he wanted to set off as early as possible, but he was held back by Mimi, who was normally extremely reluctant to leave her warm bed. She couldn’t have got up early today either, because her hair still fell unkempt over the shoulders of her dove-grey dressing gown. That disorderly frame gave her face a wild, gypsy quality, an expression that suited her very well, as she had established at the mirror. Not without a certain embarrassment she held a present out to Janki, a money bag of soft, red Morocco leather, which she herself had embroidered with the letters J M. A little crown, like the ones on the signs of the court suppliers, hovered over the monogram. As she handed it over, their hands touched, and inside the money bag – was Janki trembling, or was it Mimi? – a coin moved. ‘It’s only a lucky rappen,’ Mimi said quickly, ‘so that you do good business and it is never empty.’
‘Thank you. Merci. But now I should really . . .’ The sentence lay there, a clock that nobody had remembered to wind.
‘Yes,’ said Mimi. ‘You should.’ Her lips were suddenly dry, and she had to run her tongue over them.
‘I should be on time today of all days,’ said Janki, and still didn’t move.
‘Today of all days,’ said Mimi.
‘The money bag is beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ said Mimi, ‘it certainly is.’
‘What does JM stand for?’
Mimi didn’t understand him. ‘Janki Meijer, of course.’
‘Shame,’ said Janki.
Only Anne-Kathrin, to whom Mimi reported the conversation word-for-word that same morning, could find an explanation for that strange reaction, an explanation so illuminating that Mimi burst into tears and repeated several times in a tone of self-reproach that she was a cow, a silly cow, and if Janki now thought she was a beef cow that you had to lead by a ring through its nose before it noticed where it was going, if he despised her now as a village clod, then she had only herself to blame. Not that she wanted anything from Janki, certainement pas, she wouldn’t even think of it, but that she had not previously thought about the many ways in which such a monogram could be read, that she could not forgive herself, not if she lived to a hundred and twenty.
J M: Janki and Mimi.
So Janki said ‘Shame’, without guessing at the whirlwind of truly Talmudic interpretations those two syllables could produce. That Mimi did not immediately understand him certainly had something to do with the fact that at that precise moment Chanele arrived, she too bringing a present to celebrate the opening of Janki’s business: a little bundle wrapped shapelessly in a cloth, which she pressed into his hand with an almost reproachful ‘There, for you!’ as one eventually, and reluctantly, yields to a child’s endless pleading. Neither did she wait to see if he would unwrap it on the spot, but disappeared into the kitchen, where she was heard clattering pots and pans around as if they’d done something to her.
Janki shrugged, put the little bundle in the pocket of his coat and set off. Although Mimi stood behind the door for a long time, apparently completely fascinated by a sparrow taking its morning bath in the dust of the street, he didn’t turn round.
‘Why did you have to get involved?’
‘Involved in what?’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
No proper friendship, or even a sisterly feeling, had ever arisen between Mimi and Chanele, contrary to what Salomon had hoped, when he had so unexpectedly brought home a second baby. If Chanele was to replace Mimi’s stillborn brother, the plan was a failure; Mimi had, from the very start, resisted her rival, yelling herself sick and hoarse, had tried to peck her away as an old rooster would peck away a young one, had clung weeping to Golde for hours, and later, when she grew older, probably rubbed onions in her eyes to make the tears to which she seemed to lay claim visible for all the world. As Chanele – by her nature, or because no other possible role was open to her – proved to be a quiet, undemanding child, who allowed herself to be ordered about rather than issuing the orders – it soon became quite obvious which, in the old proverb, was the dog and which the flea.
Rather than playing with Chanele, Mimi had chosen to befriend Anne-Kathrin, with whom she could gather pearls and diamonds on the banks of the Surb, while Chanele insisted, with precocious maturity, that they were all only pebbles. When Mimi and Anne-Kathrin rescued the kitten that time, Chanele had only looked at the soaking creature, unmoved, her eyes small with concentration, and then said, ‘You know it’s a tom? We’ll have to have it castrated.’ But it then turned out, very much to Golde’s relief, that she had just picked the expression up somewhere, and had no concrete idea of what it meant.
Over the years a tradition of mutual disregard had grown up between the two young women, a ceasefire marked on both sides by unspoken contempt. Only sometimes, mostly begun by Mimi, were there violent arguments, although they didn’t clear the air like summer storms, but just went on rumbling and stopped at the horizon with thunder and lightning.
‘What do you want from Janki?’
‘What am I supposed to want from him?’
‘You’re giving him presents.’
‘Where does it say in the Shulchan Orech that I’m not allowed to?’
‘You knew I was sewing a money bag for him! What have you given him?’
‘Does that concern anyone but him?’
‘I want to say something to you.’ Mimi became so friendly that Chanele involuntarily lifted the pottery plate that she was holding in her hand like a shield in front of her chest. ‘A man like Janki isn’t interested in girls whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’
Chanele put the plate down on the table more violently than she needed to. And the cutlery that she took from the drawer clattered down more loudly than usual.
‘What do I care what he’s interested in?’
‘You gave him something!’
‘Don’t worry! It isn’t a red velvet money bag.’
‘Morocco leather! It’s Morocco leather!’
‘Make Shabbos with it!’ For the Sabbath you need very practical things: bread, wine, a piece of meat in your soup. Anything one might ironically compare with those is without reasonable value.
‘What have you given him?’ In her impatience Mimi held on tightly to Chanele’s hand. Chanele pulled away and went on laying the breakfast table.
‘A brush.’
‘A brush?’
‘And a rag.’
‘What sort of present is that? A rag?’
So that he can clean his boots. By the time he gets to Baden he’ll look as if he’s just emerged from a pigsty. Is he supposed to greet his customers with mucky shoes?’
Whether Mimi started laughing out of relief or because she found Chanele’s present so pitifully unromantic she couldn’t have said in retrospect. Any more than Chanele had an illuminating explanation for why she threw the damp cloth with which she had just wiped out the pan for the breakfast eggs into Mimi’s face. Mimi grabbed Chanele by the throat. Chanele clawed her fingers into Mimi’s unkempt curls.
When he heard the cries, Salomon Meijer, with his phylacteries still on his forehead and arm, came running from the sitting room, stood helplessly in the doorway and said, because one may not, when one has put on the tefillin, engage in conversation with anyone but God, only: ‘Now! Now! Now!’ Golde had just been combing her hair, before hiding it once more under the sheitel for the day, and with the thin grey strands over her white nightshirt she looked, like a girl grown old, even smaller than usual. She pushed the two young women apart, a dog separating two
cattle much larger than itself, slapped them both roundly and demanded to know – ‘right now this minute!’ – what evil spirit had possessed them and made them so meshuga in broad daylight.
In their embarrassment, and because they didn’t really understand their own behaviour, Mimi and Chanele dismissed it as a harmless squabble between friends, which Golde didn’t believe, but accepted for the sake of a bit of peace. Over breakfast the two of them even chatted together, but with empty courtesy, as the Prussian and French negotiators chatted when they interrupted the capitulation negotiations for a bite to eat. As is customary among diplomats, the actual subject was not once mentioned in the Meijer household.
Today the subject did not take the direct path via Ehrendingen, but instead came up through the forest, took a wide detour via the Nussbaumener Hörnli. The route was longer, but on the narrow path at least one did not risk becoming embroiled in a tiresome conversation by a bored market traveller. Today Janki wanted to be all alone, he wanted to savour the anticipation of his first day as a businessman, he just wanted to dream, as he seldom allowed himself to do. In his head he ran through all the polite and yet not submissive phrases with which he would welcome his customers from the very beginning. A first one, equipped with a great deal of taste and even more money, was stepping into the shop in his imagination and was greeted, as Monsieur Delormes had greeted all ladies who didn’t look too matronly, with ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle’, when a loud voice dragged him from his daydreams. ‘The early bird catches the worm!’ the voice blared.
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