Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  The till alone, for which Janki had actually wanted a clerk in the first place, was not within Mademoiselle Hanna’s territory. He himself attended to the financial side of things, and since Salomon’s violent words he did so very secretively, even though in the evening Chanele, who had been present at all his sales, could have told him to the franc exactly what he had taken that day. The profits were considerable.

  Chanele had always been quiet, but Mademoiselle Hanna was practically mute. She said ‘yes’ and ‘no’, she smiled politely when it was expected of her, and did everything to make herself as invisible as she was useful. She attended, whether she was asked to or not, to the tiniest matters, and had usually finished things by the time they occurred to Janki. Only once, when he asked her, using his constant argument that this was how Monsieur Delormes had always done things, to greet the customers with a curtsy, did she steadfastly refuse. They even had an argument about the matter, and it was only when Chanele said she would rather scrub the floors at home that Janki finally gave in.

  But above all Mademoiselle Hanna listened. Even as a child, with her very unclear position in the Meijer family, Chanele had become used to collecting information from the conversations of others, drawing conclusions from tones of voice and gauging power relations, of vital importance for someone to whom no fixed place in the world has been assigned. She learned quickly that the top two hundred people in Baden behaved exactly as the Jewish community of Endingen did, that the haggling and fighting over tiny degrees of rank – who had to be invited to dinner, and who did you have to be invited by? – was just as stubborn as it was about the most desirable mitzvahs on the high feast days, and that heads under feathered hats produced thoughts no cleverer than those formed under headscarves and sheitels. She observed above all how skilfully Jean Meijer was able to manipulate his customers and flatter their vanities, how with only an apparently resigned shrug of his shoulders or a regretful shake of his head he persuaded them to choose the more expensive crêpe de Chine, even though the cheaper voile would have suited them much better.

  No, she had to admit it, Janki wasn’t really an honest person, not only because of the walking stick and the artificial limp. But the same quality also made him likeable again, because he fully inhabited all the roles he played; he might have lied, but he believe his lies. He played the businessman like an actor, and he played him well.

  Chanele didn’t share these observations with anyone, certainly not with Janki himself. Generally speaking, the two of them exchanged very few words, beyond the purely businesslike. In Endingen Janki had once come out with a story unprompted, about the pub in Guebwiller or the wonders of the city of Paris. Now on the way to Baden he would often walk along beside Chanele for half an hour, and if a milk-cart stopped for them and they had to push their way side by side onto the box seat to sit beside the driver, he seemed to find that contact disagreeable.

  Mimi hardly ever got to see Janki now, at least on her own. In the week he left the house early and came back late. On Shabbos, when they would at least have had the right menucha for a reasonable conversation, Salomon almost always brought a business contact or a complete stranger along in his wake, with whom he then proceeded to have endless debates about God and the world over dinner – more about the world than about God, as was inevitably the case in the house of a cattle-trader. Janki always participated in these table discussions between tsibeles and bundel with an interest that Mimi couldn’t quite believe in, he was avoiding her, and Anne-Kathrin thought so too. When he owed the rescue of his business and its obvious success entirely to her initiative. If she hadn’t gone to Pinchas that time – and God knows going to him had not been easy – who knew whether there would still be a French Drapery at all?

  On Sunday, without synagogue, without guests and without too rich a meal, which would have made everyone sleepy all afternoon, it was no better. On the pretext of having to keep his business books, Janki locked himself in his attic room for hours at a time, even though there wasn’t so much as a table in it. ‘He can’t look you in the eye,’ was Anne-Kathrin’s interpretation of his behaviour, ‘and there can only be one reason for it.’

  Not that Mimi was jealous of Chanele, certainement pas, but who else spent all week with Janki? Who had started plucking her eyebrows, clumsily, of course, so that her face looked plucked rather than prettified, with individual ugly clumps of hair, shrubs that have survived a forest fire? In fact one should feel sorry for Chanele, Anne-Kathrin thought, because she was dreaming a dream from which there could only be a rude awakening, as many novels told one.

  But Mimi felt no pity within herself. And no hatred, of course, she would never have stooped to that, but she did feel a certain irritation, and if you said it in French, ‘elle m’irrite’, the word had the unpleasantly scratching sound that corresponded precisely to her feelings.

  In all likelihood, without that irritation, she would hardly have said ‘Why not?’ when Abraham Singer was at the door again, she would not, as if by chance, have joined the others in the kitchen and listened to what he had to say.

  Abraham Singer was a trader with no goods, at least none that one could carry around with one in a basket or show to a customs man at the border. His business territory took in Alsace, South Germany and Switzerland, but on one occasion his travels brought him all the way to Frankfurt and in one very unusual instance he concluded a deal in Budapest. If anyone asked him – but no one who had to ask was a potential customer anyway – he firmly denied being active in the field in which he had a monopoly, and from which he lived quite well, not like a king, but not like a beggar either. ‘Marriage broker?’ he would say. ‘I’m not a shadchen! Just a curious person who likes to get involved, and may that not be accounted a sin.’

  He was a squat, short-legged little man with a crooked spine that kept him permanently bent. Consequently he looked at people from below, which was very useful to him, he claimed, in the profession that he didn’t have. ‘Everyone has learned to lie upwards, but downwards they all forget.’ And then he laughed until tears came to his eyes, and had to take a checked handkerchief, big as a sail, from his pocket to wipe his face. His giggling, which he sometimes couldn’t control for minutes at a time, was so well known in Jewish families that people would say to a mother who was taking too long to marry off her daughter, ‘High time Singer came and laughed at your place.’

  A doctor doesn’t go to a house where no one is ill, and similarly Singer never came unplanned, but he always insisted on making his visit seem quite coincidental. Then he sat in the kitchen – ‘No, the parlour would be far too elegant for me, I just dropped in, just for a minute,’ spoke of this and that, told the gossip from lots of communities, talked about illnesses and deaths, but of course always about engagements and weddings too, about a shidduch that had been made here or there, ‘with a dowry, I can’t tell you how big, but the kind you would dream of for any Jewish child!’ He inquired into the wellbeing of the family, he knew more about the smaller twigs of the family trees than Mother Feigele, drank a glass of tea and then another, told the story of the stupid coachman who has his horse stolen by the gypsy, wiped his face, got up to go, sat down again and then said quite casually, ‘And your daughter, Frau Meijer? Soon to be twenty, if I remember correctly, and lovely as a flower. Quite the mamme, may my tongue fall from my mouth if I tell a lie.’ That he didn’t seem to notice Mimi, who was also sitting in the kitchen, was part of the game.

  Golde, familiar with the rules, affirmed how glad she was that Mimi wasn’t yet thinking of marrying, she thanked God for it every day. ‘I don’t know how I would cope without her, she is such a help to me and so gifted at everything to do with housekeeping.’ Then she launched into a hymn of praise for Mimi’s skills at cooking and sewing, a hymn in certain respects at odds with what Mimi normally heard on the subject. But how does the saying go? You don’t shout in the marketplace, you bring your goose back home.

  Abraham Singer sat on his chair like a
doll, his feet far above the floor, and listened to the whole thing from below. He confirmed to Golde that she was very lucky, indeed that she was bentshed by heaven in having such a sensible daughter, there were too many girls who couldn’t wait to come under the chuppah, he could name examples, more than one, in which it had not ended well at all.

  Then he drank another glass of tea, told the story of the three pedlars who fall into the stream, laughed, wiped his face, rose to go, said, ‘On the other hand . . .’ and sat down again.

  ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘I did happen to hear something, and I’m a curious person, what can I do, may it not be held against me. There is said to be a family, very, very bekovedik people, with a son, how should I put it, an only son, a pearl of a person.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Golde, but Abraham Singer would not have been so successful in his trade had he not had two particular abilities: hearing everything that might be useful to him, and ignoring everything that did not fit his plans.

  ‘But he’s supposed to be clever, so I have heard,’ he went on, ‘a real Talmud chochem. And a very practical person, too. Not like one of those Talmud students who can’t button up their trousers without first looking it up in a sefer.’

  He started laughing, but then, very much to the relief of his listeners, quickly regained control of himself and went on talking.

  ‘He also has a parnooseh, a very good job, any Jewish child would be grateful for. One day he will take over his father’s business, and he already works hard in it, even though he’s so young.’

  ‘How old?’ asked Mimi, even though by tradition she should have left all the talking to her mother.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abraham Singer, ‘you hear such things when you travel a lot. But I don’t want to bore you. When your daughter is sensibly not yet thinking of marrying, why would you be interested in where someone was looking for a shidduch?’

  ‘Where?’ asked Golde. She had long been worried that she might have to marry Mimi abroad, knowing her only child among strangers, possibly so far away that she couldn’t even hold her newborn grandson in her arms . . .

  ‘Not that far,’ said Abraham Singer, and Golde sighed with relief.

  ‘Where?’ asked Mimi.

  Even if one is not a shadchen, only a curious person who hears something here and picks up something there, one still has to live, and he who announces his secrets in the street, this much was clear to Golde, finds many buyers but no payers. She was already standing up to get the little crocheted bag in which she kept her housekeeping money out of the cupboard, but to her surprise Abraham Singer resolutely refused, he even said, ‘May my hand grow out of the grave if I accept anything from you!’ And then, while Golde chewed around on her lower lip and Mimi wiped her suddenly damp palms inconspicuously on her skirt, Singer admitted, bowing even lower than usual, if possible, a little lie, ‘may it not be held against me’. He had not come here by chance, he had been commissioned and paid. ‘What do our wise men say? Woman is made of man’s rib, and if your rib is missing, then off you go and find it.’ He had been asked to call in at the house because this young man didn’t want just any old bride but – heaven alone knew how he knew her – one in particular, who had to be called Miriam and Meijer and be his wife because otherwise he could never be happy his whole life long.

  ‘How old?’ asked Mimi.

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘Where from?’ asked Golde.

  ‘Here in Endingen.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pinchas Pomeranz,’ said Singer.

  *

  Even though autumn was already coming to an end, it had been another hot day. When Chanele had emptied the mop bucket and put the scrubber away, she took off her brown dress and, in chemise and petticoat, stood quite still. The back room, into which only a very small amount of light fell from the courtyard, through a small window placed high in the wall, was pleasantly cool. It smelled of spices whose names she didn’t know, of foreign places to which she would never travel. She ran her fingertips, as she had recently become accustomed to doing, gently over her face, from her hairline down her forehead to her nose, and it was as if she felt her touch not only on her skin but all through her body. She raised her arms above her head, her fingers interlocking, and pressed her head against her arm, first on one side, then on the other. The smell of her body mixed with the spice, a foreign land among many foreign lands. She moved her hips and stretched her arms still higher, it was not yet a dance, but she already sensed its rhythm in the distance, and she thought: ‘Mademoiselle Hanna . . .’

  ‘Sorry. I thought you’d finished.’

  She hadn’t heard the door open. Janki stood there, one leg hesitantly outstretched, a swimmer testing the temperature of the water with the tip of his toe. He held a chair in each hand.

  Chanele turned away, her arms in front of her chest, but Janki only laughed, a laugh that she could sense on her skin like her fingers a moment before, and said, ‘At Monsieur Delormes’ shop, I was never anything more to the customers than a clothes stand. You don’t have to hide from a clothes stand.’

  He set the two chairs down, not against the wall, where they belonged, but in the middle of the room, and gripped Chanele by the shoulder.

  She did not pull away. She let herself be turned around and led to the chairs that stood facing one another like two men who have stopped for a chat after the service in the square outside the synagogue. Then they both sat there, Janki in the flowery waistcoat that he had had the tailor Oggenfuss make from the leftovers of a very expensive fabric, Chanele in her petticoat, which was like a dress, indeed, but not one meant for men’s eyes.

  ‘This is fortuitous,’ said Janki, as if there were nothing at all special about the situation. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a very long time.’

  But then he seemed to forget his question, and just looked at Chanele.

  ‘It suits you,’ he said. ‘Only here . . .’ and he reached out his hand and touched Chanele right on the sensitive spot above her nose, ‘here you need to be more thorough.’

  Chanele didn’t reply.

  ‘It’s strange,’ said Janki after a pause, ‘I’ve only just arrived here, that is to say: it’s more than half a year ago, but it feels as if it were yesterday. So much has happened, and so much has changed and yet – can you understand it? – I still have the feeling . . .’

  His voice faded away as if it had got lost.

  Chanele looked past Janki. On the shelf on the wall the boxes were stacked untidily on top of one another. They contained the button samples that Janki didn’t sell, but which he had borrowed from a haberdasher so he could give examples to his customers. They needed to be put in order, thought Chanele, perhaps according to material, a system needed to be introduced.

  ‘I will have a new chemise made for you,’ said Janki, ‘out of cambric. Everything one wears against the skin should be cambric.’

  ‘Mademoiselle Hanna,’ thought Chanele.

  ‘I have this feeling,’ said Janki, ‘I often find myself thinking about it . . . That is to say: it isn’t really a thought. It’s more . . . more of a feeling, in fact.’

  Or according to colour. That was better. If you organised the buttons according to colour, you’d always have them all together, the ones that matched a fabric.

  ‘Can you understand that?’ said Janki. ‘No doubt I have years ahead of me, and yet . . . I don’t know why, but I always have to do everything very quickly.’

  ‘I don’t even know what day his birthday is,’ thought Chanele.

  ‘It’s meshuga,’ said Janki, ‘but I’ve decided to get married.’

  There was a smell of cardamom, of cloves and of a new life.

  ‘Yes,’ said Janki, got up and pushed his chair against the wall. He was about to clear the second chair away as well, but Chanele just sat where she was. She grasped his outstretched hand, took both his hands, lifted her head with its new face and looked Janki in the eye for the fi
rst time.

  ‘You wanted to ask me something?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Janki, embarrassed. ‘I wanted to ask you . . . How much of a dowry do you think Mimi will get?’

  11

  Salomon only haggled out of cattle-trading habit, without any fire. With this future son-in-law, trading had stopped being fun. Janki had turned up formally, almost solemnly, for the discussion, he came from his room in yontevdik new trousers and his freshly brushed uniform jacket and marched as stiffly down the stairs as a general handing over a conquered fortress. He held his hand out to Salomon as if to a stranger, leaned his walking stick with the lion’s-head handle carefully against the table and then sat ramrod-straight on his chair without touching the back.

  Twenty thousand, he said, that would be the ideal figure. The textile store had luckily been very well received in the better circles, but the plain people of the town seemed to be put off by the exclusiveness of the clientele, probably because they were worried that they wouldn’t find anything to suit their purses in the French Drapery. But Switzerland wasn’t France, and Baden certainly wasn’t Paris, elegant people were thin on the ground, so it seemed appropriate for him, Janki, for once not to follow the model of Monsieur Delormes, but to address his wares to a wider, even a peasant audience. That would, however, make the opening of additional branches necessary; by a happy chance the possibility existed of taking over the entire ground floor of the ideally situated house with the Red Shield, which belonged to the wealthy Schnegg family, with the option of buying the building itself. But even though he had given the matter his most serious consideration, he did not want to give up the shop on the Vordere Metzggasse, but rather to attempt to run both shops, each aimed at a different clientele, in parallel to one another. With the right staff – this too was an expense to be borne in mind – this could certainly be accomplished. He would in any case have to reorganise himself in this respect, after Chanele had found the daily journey to Baden too exhausting, and decided henceforth to remain in Endingen again. Apart from rent, equipment and staff, the cost of a larger order from Paris would have to be taken into account, and to some extent the fittings for the new shop. Of course that could all be done with sixteen, or rather, on a tight margin, even fifteen and a half thousand, but Mimi – it was the first time that her name was mentioned in the context of this wedding proposal – had expressed a desire to settle in Baden, and the furnishing of a more or less suitable dwelling could not be had for nothing. All in all: twenty thousand.