‘I love you too,’ said Mimi and pursed her lips.
‘Right,’ said Janki, as one rounds off a not particularly important point in a business discussion. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘At last!’ thought Mimi. The clothes were ordered and the sheitel well on its way. Now it was time for the other thing that she always flicked so eagerly through Anne-Kathrin’s books to find.
‘It’s like this,’ said Janki. ‘I’ve thought about everything very hard, over and over again.’
‘Yes?’ said Mimi.
‘It’s not going to work,’ said Janki.
‘What?’
‘It’s not going to work at all if you don’t work in the shop.’
12
Not that Chanele was listening. As Mimi would have said, certainement pas. But she was busy in the kitchen, the kitchen was the place where she belonged, where she would always belong now, as long as she lived; she was a sensible person and she didn’t dream of impossible things. She had come into the world to wash the dishes, she had come to terms with it once and for all, anything else was pointless woolgathering, pie in the sky. She wasn’t in the kitchen to enjoy herself, certainly not, and if those two couldn’t keep their argument any quieter, that was their problem. Mimi and Janki weren’t exactly yelling at each other, you couldn’t say that, but if you didn’t exactly plug your ears – and why should Chanele have had to do that? Was it her fault if the wall between parlour and kitchen wasn’t any thicker? If you weren’t as deaf as old Schmarje Braunschweig, then you were practically forced to listen to the two of them hissing at each other. If that was the tone that young couples in love adopted with each other, then Chanele was glad, oh yes, really glad, that she had decided once and for all to have nothing more to do with men, they were as much use as a loaf of bread at Pesach.
Those two, you didn’t have to listen at the wall to hear them, were arguing about whether Mimi was to be a housewife after the wedding, or a member of staff at the shop. Janki tried his well-practised sales patter at first, describing the joys of such shared activity as enticingly as he would have described an as yet untailored jacket to his customers. Mimi, for her part, reacted with the same childishly wheedling voice that she had always used when she wanted to wrap her parents, particularly Salomon, around her finger, she was entirely the helpless little girl who couldn’t understand what the big bad world wanted of her. When that didn’t work, she moved on to a tone of insulted injury, a sudden switch with which Chanele was all too familiar. She had actually thought that Jean had asked for her hand out of love – she still called him Jean, but she now spoke the name with a sarcastic undertone – and now she discovered that he hadn’t been after a wife at all, just a cheap serving wench, a Jewish bishge, but she was too good for that, far too good, and she never wanted to hear another word on the subject. Janki answered with numbers, he talked about takings and running costs, and paced back and forth as he did so. You didn’t have to have your ear to the wall to notice that; his footsteps could be clearly heard even in the kitchen, firm and regular, without the weekday limp that he had adopted for the benefit of his clientele. ‘She’s going to cry in a minute,’ thought Chanele, and sure enough, she could already here Mimi sniffing as she had done even as a little girl when she threatened to lose a battle for a doll or the last piece of Shabbos cake. His demands were causing her pain, Mimi wailed, she had really expected better from her Rodolphe – ‘What Rudolf?’ thought Chanele – she had thought he didn’t have the soul of a grocer like all the others, the disappointment was crushing her soul now, and he couldn’t want his little Mimi to be unhappy, could he, he couldn’t want that?
It was at that point that he began to hiss, at which the words ‘spoilt little girl’ and ‘you can’t do business sitting on your tochus’ were uttered, and Chanele in her kitchen, probably unlike Janki, was not at all surprised when Mimi abruptly stopped crying and hissed back that a wife wasn’t a commodity that you could buy and then do with what you liked until the end of time, and that people who had come here with nothing on their backs, with nothing at all, were in no position to redraft the laws of the land.
If one belongs once and for all in the kitchen, if that is the lot that one has been given in life, then one should do one’s work thoroughly, so Chanele decided that the plates that she had just washed weren’t clean enough, and started all over again from the beginning, purely out of a sense of duty, not, for instance, so that someone who came charging furiously out of the parlour into the kitchen, would find her at work and wouldn’t find themselves wondering whether she might have taken the slightest interest in what was happening in the next room. Certainement pas, isn’t that so, Mimi?’
The good Shabbos plates had to be treated with great care, so she didn’t even look up when the door slammed behind her. That could only be Mimi, who liked to bring to a dramatic conclusion arguments she hadn’t been able to win. At first Chanele didn’t even notice Janki coming into the kitchen, picking up one of the freshly washed glasses and pouring himself some of the Kiddush wine which should really – but one is discreet, of course, and doesn’t want to disturb the young betrothed – have been put back in the cupboard in the parlour ages ago.
‘Can anyone understand a woman?’ asked Janki.
‘Not you.’ Chanele bit her lip, because she hadn’t actually wanted to say anything.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing,’ said Chanele, and rubbed away at a stain that she knew to be a flaw in the stone.
‘Why don’t I understand anything about women?’
‘That’s why.’
‘And excuse me, but how do you know that?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Chanele. ‘I completely forgot I have no eyes. And no ears. And certainly no heart.’
‘Don’t you start!’
‘Start what?’ If you want to do it properly, washing up is not a simple matter, and requires a great deal of concentration.
‘Mimi is so strange today. Is it so bad, working with me in the shop? Tell me!’
‘It depends,’ said Chanele, and examined a plate as carefully as if it had suddenly developed a completely new pattern, ‘depends what you compare it to. Breaking stones is probably harder.’
‘Why did you stop?’
‘I’m more suited to a kitchen. You have to know your place.’
‘You said the long journey . . .’
‘You choose!’
Janki’s right hand opened and closed again. In order to interpret the gesture, you would have had to study it as long and as closely as Chanele had. His fingers were looking for the walking stick with the lion’s-head handle, which he didn’t have with him because it was Shabbos.
‘I thought you always understood everything,’ said Chanele. ‘Such a clever man. Who has experienced so much. Who was even at the battle of Sedan.’
‘You know very well . . .’
‘I don’t know anything. I’m stupid. Fit for the kitchen.’
‘You aren’t stupid!’
‘I am!’ said Chanele, with profound conviction. ‘Nobody could possibly be stupider than I am.’
Janki drained his glass of expensive Kiddush wine in one go. ‘Now please explain to me . . .’
The Shabbos plates went in the cupboard in the parlour. Once it had been washed and dried, it had to be cleared away again. For someone destined by fate for housework, such a thing is more important than chatting to a man engaged to someone else.
Janki hurried after her. ‘What are you doing, in fact?’
‘My work. Does it say anywhere that you have to leave everything lying about the place because some posh gentleman suddenly feels like having a chat?’
‘I’m not a posh gentleman!’
‘Oh, Monsieur Jean, whence this sudden modesty?’
She just wanted to stack the plates on the second shelf from the bottom, and he just wanted her to listen to him at last. That it looked as if she was kneelin
g in front of him and he was pulling her up to him was just coincidence. And that he went on holding her hands when she was already standing before him meant nothing at all.
‘Chanele, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ she wanted to say, cattily and with great detachment. Her voice was supposed to be cold and firm, not cracked and tearful. And she certainly didn’t want to say, ‘I hate you.’ Not in that tone.
‘I don’t understand . . .’ Janki said for the second time.
‘But it’s true.’ Chanele knew she would regret it, but it felt good, it felt so good not controlling herself for once, not being sensible. ‘You don’t understand anything. You look at a person and the person thinks you like something about them and really . . . You only ever see what can be useful to you. You knead away at a person and adjust them until they’re what fits your purpose. You call them Mademoiselle Hanna when you want to impress the fine ladies, and Chanele if you need someone to put your dinner on the table. But they’re not all like you, they can’t all suddenly become heroes just by picking up a walking stick and starting to limp. Most people don’t think they can be a soldier one day and trade horses the next and forever adapt and change and always be exactly what happens to be useful. There are people who think you really love them if you treat them as if you do.’
‘You mean Mimi?’
‘Yes,’ said Chanele. ‘I mean Mimi too.’
‘Too?’
‘Yes – do you think I plucked my eyebrows to please your customers?’
Pinchas Pomeranz could have explained to Janki what was going on inside him at that moment. Sometimes you sit for hours over a page of the Gemara, and nothing on it makes any sense at all. You’ve been through the text again and again, you’ve battled through Rashi’s commentaries, and it’s still all incomprehensible, a stormy sea full of words hurled together at random, from which only the names of wise rabbis loom like islands. And then, all of a sudden, the beginning of a sentence shifts in your head, questions and answers divide anew – because the Talmud, like a human being, has no punctuation to make comprehension easier – and everything is illuminating and clear, so simple that you can’t explain to yourself why you didn’t see it that way from the very start. Such moments are lovely, but also frightening, because they make it clear to you how easy it is to be blind with your eyes open.
‘I had no idea,’ said Janki.
‘No,’ said Chanele. ‘You have no idea.’
‘I would never have thought . . .’
‘No,’ said Chanele, ‘you didn’t think.’
‘But again, I’ve never said anything to you that would have led you to imagine . . .’
‘No,’ said Chanele, ‘you’ve never said a thing. And even though you’re not going to understand this, Janki Meijer, thinking has nothing to do with it.’
The plates were still on the floor. But even though Chanele had to bend down very low to reach their shelf, it would never have occurred to anybody now to think that she was kneeling in front of Janki.
When she was finished she wanted to leave, but he stood in her way. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Chanele slowly raised her shoulders and just as slowly lowered them. She looked at him with a smile which, now that her eyebrows no longer met in the middle, seemed to float on her face. ‘Make Shabbos with it,’ she said.
Outside the front door was opened and closed again. ‘Your kalleh is leaving,’ said Chanele. ‘You should go after her. Not that you want to put yourself to too much trouble.’
Mimi hadn’t wanted to leave, not really. She had only come out with all those things because she’d felt sorry for Pinchas for a moment, because she didn’t want to leave him standing in the street like that. If you’ve started a book, you don’t set it down mid-chapter. And if you really thought about it, she even owed Pinchas something, Janki owed him something and she was Janki’s fiancée so she had her obligation. Yes, it really was a proper obligation. If Pinchas hadn’t written that article, which was much more dextrous and imaginative than anyone would have thought him capable of, Janki might have been an assistant to tailor Oggenfuss right now, and wouldn’t have been able to think of marriage. Of course, Janki wouldn’t be pleased by what she’d done, but he didn’t need to find out, and if he did, well, then he needed to learn from the start that a Mimi Meijer would not be ordered around by him like that, she had her own head, she could think for herself, after all she was the daughter of the respected Salomon Meijer and brought with her a nedinye that no one needed to be ashamed of.
There was no one else on the road in Endingen, at least not in the Jewish part of the village. At around this time most people were asleep, crushed by the weight of the heavy Sabbath dinner. Only later, when the men went back to the synagogue for Mincha, would the women visit one another to ruddel, to swap the latest gossip and rumours. What was wrong with meeting a girlfriend, a goyish girlfriend, fair enough, but is a girlfriend not a girlfriend? What was so wrong about sitting with her in a gazebo for half an hour, when there was so much to talk about and discuss before a wedding? Whose business was it if one took the path along the river and then – just because it was closer, why else – forced one’s way through a hedge in one’s fine dress?
Pinchas was already sitting there. He leapt up when he saw Mimi coming, he was about to dash towards her, but stumbled over the single step that led into the gazebo. His black Shabbos hat rolled to her feet, and as they both bent down for it at the same time, their heads were very close to one another for a moment.
‘Here,’ said Mimi and handed him the hat.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
Mimi was almost two heads smaller than Pinchas, and when she looked up at him now, he seemed to tower above the low roof of the gazebo. ‘Let’s sit down,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Pinchas. ‘Let’s do that.’
The entrance to the bower was more than wide enough for two people, but Pinchas still took a step backwards, it wasn’t clear whether he was politely letting her walk ahead, or whether he was afraid of touching her.
Left over from a patriotic celebration or some Italian party or other, ribbons with brightly printed paper flags, already slightly faded were strung below the roof of the gazebo, and a few wind-battered Chinese lanterns hung there too. Mimi was reminded of the brightly decorated Tabernacle in which they had sat only two weeks before.
Pinchas rubbed his hat with his sleeve, even though it wasn’t dusty in the slightest. At the same time he wiggled his tongue in the gap in his teeth like a trumpeter going through a difficult piece in his head before putting the instrument to his lips.
‘So,’ said Mimi, when Pinchas showed no sign of starting the conversation. ‘I came.’
‘I didn’t expect you to,’ said Pinchas.
‘Don’t you trust me?’ Mimi threw her curls out of her forehead in a playful sulk, a gesture which, and she had tried it in front of the mirror on more than one occasion, suited her very well.
‘No, I do,’ said Pinchas quickly, ‘of course. But . . .’ The tongue was now playing prestissimo in the gap. ‘I thought perhaps you didn’t want to hear what I . . . I mean: it’s not seemly.’
‘What isn’t seemly?’
‘For me to . . . When you and Janki . . .’
‘So am I not allowed to talk to anyone any more?’
‘Talk, of course. But . . .’ When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple moved up and down at least an inch and a half. Anne-Kathrin, who knew such things or claimed to, had once claimed that men with conspicuous Adam’s apples were particularly tender. The purest nonsense, of course. It was easy to claim assert something that you could never try out or put to the test. Pinchas of all people.
‘You’re laughing at me,’ said Pinchas.
‘Not at all.’
‘You smiled.’
‘Don’t you like that?’
It was like a game. Pinchas threw her the balls, and she caught them or batted them back, just as she wanted. There were little bo
ys in the village who could make their hoops dance in the street, in a straight line or a circle, and barely had to use their whips. That was exactly what Mimi was like right then.
‘Don’t you like it?’ she said again.
‘I do. I like everything about you. You’re . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve tried to tell you before. You’re beautiful. Like a herd of . . .’
‘Oxen, I know.’
‘Goats.’
‘Not any better.’
‘Rashi says King Solomon . . .’
‘Is this turning into a lesson?’
‘I just wanted to . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I just wanted to have told you once.’
‘What?’
Pinchas stared at the paper flags with the faded Canton crests, as if there could be nothing more fascinating than the bears of Bern or the chamois of Graubünden. As he did so he murmured something, so quietly that Mimi couldn’t make out the words.
‘Well?’
‘I love you, Miriam,’ said Pinchas.
‘What?’
‘I wanted to have said it once. Just once. I have loved you. Really. You will marry your Janki and I will marry some woman that Abraham Singer will find for me, but at least I’ve told you. I would have loved you.’
There was a laugh that one was supposed to laugh at such moments, ‘pearly’, it is called in the books, and Mimi had always liked the word. But now, when it would have been appropriate, she couldn’t do it.
‘Are you crying?’ asked Pinchas.
‘Of course not,’ said Mimi.
A gust of wind rustled the flags as if they had something important to whisper to them.
‘And now?’ asked Mimi.
‘It will soon be time for Mincha,’ said Pinchas. ‘I should . . .’ But he made no move to get up.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mimi.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
And then, because it was the last time, because Pinchas looked so unhappy, because she’d read so many novels, for one reason and for every possible reason and for none, because Janki demanded such impossible things of her, because it was autumn, because she would soon be a married woman, with an apartment of her own and a sheitel and a bunch of keys, because she was furious and surprised and touched, for whatever reason, she reached out her arm and drew Pinchas’s head to her and pursed her lips and . . .
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