Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘I mean . . .’ she said.

  ‘You’ve just made me very happy.’

  He just didn’t seem to understand what she was trying to say to him. Luckily a sentence occurred to her, one that she had liked a great deal in a book and which suited the situation perfectly. ‘Our hearts don’t sing the same tune,’ she said.

  ‘What sort of tune?’ asked Pinchas.

  ‘No tune. Forget the tune!’

  ‘You said . . .’

  ‘I was going to say: you and I are just too different.’

  ‘Of course we’re different,’ said Pinchas and bent low over his pot. ‘I’m a man and you’re a woman. So—’

  ‘Are you even listening to me?’ asked Mimi.

  But Pinchas had stopped listening. He had spotted from some change in the stock pot that the right moment had come, so he hauled the paddle out, the pale white intestines snaking from it, laid it over the edges of the pot and then – Mimi felt a bitter taste rising in her throat and couldn’t look away – then he grabbed the revolting, wobbly stuff with his bare hands, pulled it hand over fist out of the brew and hung it in dripping garlands on a stand.

  ‘So,’ Pinchas said at last and walked over to her, ‘now we can talk.’

  Mimi started retching.

  In Baden, Chanele was being shown around the shop that she’d already heard so much about, and saying, because Janki seemed to expect as much, a few words of praise about the establishment. She felt as if she was being challenged to say something about the carpentry of the coffin-maker at a funeral. All the time when she was in the shop not a single customer appeared, and when she left to go shopping, Janki was standing forlornly behind his new counter, a little boy with a birthday present that the other children don’t want to play with.

  Red Moische, and also the pedlars by whom Endingen was sometimes overrun as if by ants in the spring, feared Chanele as an expert customer. She knew how to test the firmness of a hem with her teeth, and which colour the gills of a carp should have if it was really fresh. Golde even let her go shopping for the chicken on Shabbos, and Chanele only had to look at a bird to predict to within half a cup how much fat it would produce. Here in the town everything was different. The shops were strange, the traders unfamiliar, and Chanele didn’t even know exactly what kind of shop she should do her shopping in. She stood for a long while in front of a shop window full of all kinds of tools, before walking on. She was already holding the handle to the door of the hardware shop, but she didn’t like the look of the owner, who was smiling at her so expectantly through the glass. In the end she decided for a barber.

  When the shop doorbell rang, three men turned their heads to her at once: the barber, his customer and a man dressed in grey who, Tagblatt in hand, was waiting to be served. Only the hairdresser’s wife, ensconced on a high chair behind the till, didn’t seem to notice her. The three of them studied Chanele for a moment, saw nothing worth looking at, and resumed the conversation they had been having when she came in.

  ‘Now finish your story, Bruppbacher,’ said the customer. When he talked, only the freshly shaven half of his face seemed to move, while the other, behind a thick application of soapy foam, lay dead next to it.

  The barber was dressed like an artist, with a narrow neckerchief tied into a bow. On his upper lip there sat a waxed moustache that ended in a point, the masterpiece that a craftsman proudly puts on display in his window. ‘Certainly, Doctor,’ he said. ‘So the man waits and waits. Eventually the landlord closes the book and says, “Sorry, we have only one very small room free. And I’m sorry to say that your nose wouldn’t fit in it.”’

  The man with the foam on his face laughed.

  The waiting man lowered his paper. ‘Vulgar,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Jokes don’t solve problems.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Chanele took a step into the barber’s shop. ‘Do you have razors?’

  ‘No,’ the barber replied, ‘I shave my customers with a spoon.’

  The man in the chair laughed so violently that he blew scraps of foam into the air.

  ‘I mean,’ said Chanele, ‘what I meant was: do you have razors for sale?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the barber. ‘I sell razors and tobacco and silk stockings. Welcome to the Baden emporium!’

  The visible half of his customer’s face turned crimson. He had choked on the shaving foam out of sheer delight.

  ‘Have some manners,’ the man in the grey suit said reproachfully and turned to Chanele. ‘What kind of razor were you after?’

  ‘I think I’ve come to the wrong place.’ Chanele was about to turn to leave, but the man grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go.

  ‘No, no, tell us! What kind of razor do you need?’

  Chanele looked at the floor in embarrassment. She tried to free herself, but the man’s hand was as firm as iron. Then she whispered almost silently: ‘I thought a barber . . . If you want to remove facial hair . . .’

  ‘Facial hair?’ The man’s fingers ran almost tenderly over the flower in his lapel. ‘We can’t help you there, I’m afraid. If you’d needed one to slit your throat, we’d have been happy to help you.’ He said it so politely, without raising his voice, that it took Chanele a few seconds to understand his meaning.

  The man in the shaving chair only started laughing then as well.

  The barber’s wife, who had followed the whole conversation with an expressionless face climbed down from her high chair and pushed Chanele towards the door. ‘It’s better if you go now. Can’t you tell that you’re not wanted here?’ she said.

  Mimi would never have thought that she would one day be sitting with Pinchas in Anne-Kathrin’s gazebo. But she had to talk to him, she needed fresh air, and there aren’t many places in a village where you can go unobserved. They sat as far away from one another as the hexagon of the bench allowed. Pinchas stared out into the garden as if he was interested only in rosebushes and bunches of elderflower. Without noticing, he kept sticking the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth; it looked as if there was something alive in his mouth.

  ‘Yesterday you said you’d try to help him. Help us. Help me.’

  ‘I’d do anything for you.’ The sentence had been waiting a whole night to at last be uttered, and it forced its way out of Pinchas like a prisoner from his dark cell.

  ‘Even though you know . . .?’

  ‘Not the same tune. I’ve understood.’ Pinchas lowered his head. He would have had quite an attractive profile if it hadn’t been for that sparse beard. And the gap in his teeth, of course.

  ‘Janki and I, on the other hand . . .’ She sensed that she was hurting Pinchas by saying these words, and it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. How had they put it in that Mimi novel? Savage brutality.

  ‘Do you see any possible way of helping him?’ she asked. ‘That article . . .’

  ‘I’ve thought about it.’

  ‘And you could . . .?’ Her voice suddenly sounded wheedling, a child that wants something it hasn’t really deserved. He knew this voice was a lie, but he happily allowed himself to be lied to.

  ‘You know what I learned yesterday in Gemara?’ he asked and added quickly: ‘It’s relevant. I think it’s relevant.’

  And so it came to pass that Pinchas, in the gazebo of the goyish schoolmaster, told the story of Rabba bar bar Chana, who claimed that while on a sea voyage he had encountered a fish, entirely covered with sand and grass and so big that people thought it was an island, that they disembarked and lit a fire on the fish to prepare their dinner. Mimi didn’t interrupt him until he had also told her how the fish, when it felt its back getting hotter and hotter, plunged into the water, and all the seamen would have drowned if their ship hadn’t been anchored so close by. Only then did she ask, ‘And what are you telling us?’

  ‘Well,’ said Pinchas, ‘of course the story isn’t true. Any more than the story in the paper is true. And even so, our sages in Babylon wrote it down and put it in the Talmud. Then the question arises
: why?’ Pinchas lapsed back into the tune of a Talmudic disputation. ‘What could the reason be? Are we to learn something from the story? Are we to believe that there are fish that people can mistake for islands? Hardly. The Amoraeans who wrote the Talmud were practical people. They were concerned with barriers for artesian wells and things of that kind. They knew that history was a fairy tale and still they preserved it for later generations. What reason might they have had for that?’

  ‘Nu?’ thought Mimi.

  ‘Might it not be that they simply liked the story? Because it was a good story? Because people like to believe good stories? Even though they know that they can’t be true? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it: they put a story in the paper so that no one would buy from Janki. So we have to come up with a better story to make them change their minds. They’re lying? So be it. We’ll just lie better!’

  Chanele had spent a long time sitting on the edge of the fountain, dipping her arm into the water. She felt as if she had to wash the man’s touch off her, as if his hand on her sleeve had left a stain that everyone could see on her. She herself didn’t understand, couldn’t explain to herself, why she hadn’t just pulled away and pushed him off, why she had answered him, why she had answered him in front of those men, why she had spoken of something that didn’t even concern Golde, why she had let him . . .

  ‘There you are,’ said an unfamiliar voice. Chanele spun round and lifted her arms as if to ward off a blow.

  It was the barber’s wife, a bony, matter-of-fact person that you could have imagined behind a market stall if there hadn’t been a smell of talcum and face lotion about her. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she said.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ Chanele heard herself talking in a strange voice, fearful and insecure.

  The woman sat down next to her on the edge of the fountain. ‘Careful,’ she said after a pause, ‘you’re making your dress all wet.’

  Chanele defiantly plunged her arm even deeper into the water.

  ‘They’re men,’ said the woman. ‘Men need enemies. I don’t know why. It seems just to be something inside them.’

  ‘What do want with me?’

  ‘If they speak,’ said the woman, ‘then you have to let them speak. There’s nothing you can do. But I wasn’t happy about the way they treated you. Why did you come into our shop, of all places?’

  ‘I thought a barber . . .’

  ‘There are six barbers in Baden. Five other barbers. Everybody knows my husband doesn’t like Jews.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Chanele, feeling guilty. ‘I just wanted . . .’

  ‘I heard what you wanted.’ It sounded like a reproach. ‘Completely wrong. You don’t do something like that with razors. You have to pluck. It hurts, but you’ll survive. Here.’ She held a tin out to Chanele.

  Chanele folded her arms.

  ‘As you wish,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t care.’ She dropped the tin into the fountain and got to her feet. ‘But you’d really look a lot prettier without those eyebrows.

  On her own again, Chanele looked at the tin for a long time. It hadn’t sunk, but floated, turning gently bobbing circles on the surface of the water. On the lid, two heads stared into the distance: an English officer with a bushy moustache and a dark-haired man in a turban. Above the picture it said in ornate writing: Original Indian Macassar Hair Pomade. The tin seemed to be trying to make its way towards her again and again, and each time it did, before it reached the edge, it was driven away again by the stream of water from the fountain pipe.

  At last Chanele reached into the water, fetched the tin out and opened the lid. The tin seemed to be full to the brim with crumpled paper, the firm, light brown paper that is pulled over the head-rests of barbers’ chairs. It rustled when she unfolded it.

  When she saw what the strange woman had brought her, Chanele’s eyes filled with tears.

  It was a pair of tweezers.

  ‘He fought in the Battle of Sedan,’ said Pinchas.

  ‘He says he never heard a shot.’

  ‘Could be. But that doesn’t make a good story. And of course he was wounded. A bullet went through his arm.’

  ‘Heaven forbid!’ Mimi cried in horror.

  ‘You’re right, Miriam,’ said Pinchas, ‘let’s leave his arm alone.’

  Mimi nodded with relief.

  ‘He needs his arm for his work. They shot him in the leg.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You choose which one.’ Pinchas laughed. He was completely transformed, he talked uninhibitedly, gesticulated and kept interrupting Mimi.

  ‘That tailor he worked for in Paris. What’s his name?’

  ‘Delormes. But he’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ said Pinchas and nodded contentedly. ‘That’s good. Then he won’t contradict us. And this friend of yours, what’s her name?’

  ‘Anne-Kathrin. Is she going to appear in the story as well?’

  ‘She’s going to lend us paper and ink,’ said Pinchas. ‘We’ve got to write it all down.’

  9

  ‘An interesting anecdote from the Franco-Prussian War. During the siege of Paris – our correspondent reported extensively on this in these very pages – a series of events began which will provoke shock and sympathy in the heart of any well-intentioned and sensitive human being. We have no wish to deprive our dear readership of the report that has only lately reached our ears, not least because the chain of events in its outermost link has also touched our lovely town of Baden, confirming the saying of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that war is the father of all things.’

  Pinchas, who read the Tagblatt every day, had insisted on the convoluted sentence construction. The classical quotation was supplied by Anne-Kathrin, who had a large supply of them thanks to her father.

  ‘Our lady readers, particularly if they regularly study Die Dame or Jardin des Modes’ (a contribution from Mimi) ‘will be familiar with the name François Delormes. This master of the needle, as effusive admirers have praised him in the past, proudly refused, in spite of the requests of his many friends and admirers, to leave his beloved native city before the outbreak of hostilities. In a reversal of the cynical saying, he would dismiss all warnings with, Ubi bene, ibi patria.’

  If it had been up to Anne-Kathrin, Monsieur Delormes would have added, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ But Mimi and Pinchas had firmly rejected that one.

  ‘The steely grip of the siege was closing ever more tightly around the French capital, and soon the city of lights sank into leaden darkness. The fearful silence of a hospital reigned where once everyone had sung and danced so gaily. Where the Erinnyes rule, the Muses fall silent.’

  Pinchas had to explain to the others what Erinnyes were, and Mimi, who had always taken him as a pure student of the Talmud, was surprised by his knowledge.

  ‘Food supplies were growing increasingly scarce. Each inhabitant of Paris was given a daily allowance of just a hundred grammes of bad bread, and anyone who managed to acquire this pitiful amount for himself and his loved ones considered himself lucky.

  ‘For François Delormes, who had been made rich long since by the popularity of his fashionable creations, it would have been an easy matter to escape the restrictions of these days of starvation and buy the choicest delicacies from the profiteers who, as everyone knows, multiply like bluebottles on a carcass in times of need. But nothing could have been further from this brave man’s mind. He had the contents of his cellar distributed among the needy, and he himself settled for water and dry bread.’

  Inspired by his newly discovered journalistic talents, Pinchas had also sketched out a passage in which Monsieur Delormes set one day each week aside for fasting, but the others deleted it again as being too Jewish.

  ‘But that was not enough! When the siege was at its worst François Delormes gathered his closest colleagues around him—’

  ‘Colleagues?’ asked
Anne-Kathrin. ‘Doesn’t he have any family?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be good for the story,’ said Pinchas.

  ‘—and informed them of something that was to shock them to the very core. In spite of his seventy years—’

  ‘Sixty,’ Anne-Kathrin suggested.

  ‘Fifty,’ said Mimi.

  ‘In spite of his mature years he had volunteered for the national guard, to go to the front and face the foe who were making his beloved native city endure such hardships. Everyone tried to talk him out of his decision, knowing that in the given situation it would mean certain death—’

  ‘Dulce et decorum,’ said Anne-Kathrin.

  ‘Sha!’

  ‘—but François Delormes would not be dissuaded either by pleas or by tears. With admirable calm and circumspection he sorted out his affairs, determined a successor to carry on the business of the fashion house as well as possible, and gave this successor, one Paul-Marc Lemercier, his first and at the same time his final commission. “The best worker I have had in the last few years,” he said, “the only one I found truly worthy one day to wear my mantle, is as I speak fighting somewhere in France against the mighty foe. I don’t even know if this master pupil of mine is still alive, or whether an enemy bullet might not have whipped him away. But be that as it may: the best fabrics, the most artful materials from my studio, I leave to none other than to him. If he is no longer alive, then let them crumble to dust rather than belong to someone else less appropriate to the task. I therefore determine that a cart bearing this precious cargo be dispatched today on the way towards his native town—”’

  ‘Where does Janki come from?’

  ‘Guebwiller.’

  ‘No one’s heard of it.’

  ‘“—on the way towards Colmar, and await him there until he or his coffin returns from the battlefield.”’

  ‘With the shield or on the shield!’ said Anne-Kathrin.

  At that point a problem arose which nearly defeated them: how do you transport noble material from a city hermetically encircled by the enemy? But Pinchas, inspired by Rabba bar bar Chana, who had a snake swallow a crocodile as big as a whole city, again found a solution here.