‘In our house it was Salomon’s head that decreed the rules,’ Golde said. ‘Things will be the same for you. And that’s why you need different clothes.’
That had been the start. Without the new shop Chanele would probably never have become Madame Meijer.
Janki, who also saw himself as something of an artist where business matters were concerned, had only thought in the most general terms about the possibilities for further development that a wider clientele would involve, he fantasised numbers, and he liked those numbers, but it was Chanele who knew from her own experience the everyday life and the needs of the people who would buy at the new shop. Often enough she had suffered from the compulsion of having to talk her way at length into a discount of five rappen or a handful of free corks, so she was the first to see to it – later no one could imagine things being otherwise, but back in the 1870s it represented an unheard-of innovation – that all goods, without exception, were sold at an unchangeable price fixed in writing, so that from the outset there was no bargaining in the shop, no ‘Jewing’, as it was generally known. ‘For every customer delighted with a good deal, you will get three who feel cheated,’ she told Janki. ‘And besides; we can’t leave it up to each individual assistant to set the price from one case to the next.’ But the argument with which she most thoroughly convinced him was a quite different one: ‘I’ve heard that this is what they do now in the smartest shops in London.’
Furthermore, and this too was an unheard-of innovation at the time, the Emporium was the first establishment in the place that employed saleswomen as well as salesmen. Admittedly female assistants had not been anything unusual in the past, but they had their place, as seamstresses or ironing ladies, only ever in the back rooms. Now young women physically stood there behind the counters, in the uniform that Chanele had designed for them: a black dress with a narrow white collar, and a pale grey apron. When she herself went to work – and increasingly she felt that only what she did outside the house was real work – Chanele was dressed very similarly, although of course without the apron. Instead of the collar her dress had a white trim, no longer cambric but the best Brussels lace, affixed to which, like a kind of officer’s flash, there was a brooch with a cameo that Golde had given to her as a wedding present.
If Chanele liked to employ women it had nothing to do with emancipation, a word that might have been known in Zurich, but certainly not in Baden. Women’s wages were lower, that was one very practical reason, and the other: there are lots of things that women would never buy from men. What one might once have bought from a familiar door-to-door saleswoman was now suddenly available, with the same discretion but in a much wider selection, at the House of the Red Sign, and even in its first year of business the Modern Emporium sold considerable quantities of embroidered ladies’ stockings and above all corsets, which in their simplest form could be had for as little as a franc. Janki was glad of the good profits he made in such everyday articles as children’s pinafores or knitted striped socks for ladies, but those things were not the ones that really interested him. It would have been extremely embarrassing for him to walk through the shop and have a lady customer ask him about dress shields or waistbands.
So it was that the French Store and the Modern Emporium gradually became two very different shops, his and hers, each one with its own very particular character. On Vordere Metzggasse everything was French and elegant; Monsieur Jean Meijer held court among select fabrics, carried out sales as an act of mercy and received the money of his lady customers as a tribute quite naturally owed to him. Sometimes, and these were often the most lucrative afternoons, he didn’t even open the curtains over the shelves, he only talked for an hour or two with the ladies of the town and, if heavily coaxed, related this or that experience from the Battle of Sedan.
In the House with the Red Sign, on the other hand, they got straight to the point, they talked not about heroic deeds but about indienne or muslin, they sold fabrics promptly by the metre or, for the older ladies, by the ell, and treated city women and villagers with the same routine politeness. Chanele – no: Madame Meijer – ran a tight ship, and woe to the assistant who dared to be sniffy when dealing with a customer from the country just because she wanted to buy nothing more than an antimacassar or a piece of Russian braid. ‘We will have to gather everyone together again,’ Madame Meijer made a mental note, ‘and remind them that the smallest purchase is as important to us as the largest.’
Chanele ended her round and went back to her office, a modest room, smaller than that of Ziltener the accountant. The decoration was spartan, like the captain’s cabin on a warship; there was only one shelf for files, and a plain writing-desk scattered with old ink stains, the last of the pieces of furniture that had come from Guebwiller back then. Here too she had developed a little ritual: every evening, as a final task, before she went home, she turned the little cardboard discs on her calendar so that they were ready for the next day. As she turned the ninth of May 1893 into the tenth, and a Tuesday into a Wednesday, the town clock struck the quarter-hour and Chanele thought, ‘I must get a move on. Janki will go quite meshuga with waiting.’ At the same time, spurred on by the same chimes, Madame Meijer was considering: ‘Communion wreath. With cloth flowers and embroidery. That would certainly go down well at this time of year.’
‘Excuse me.’ The knocking had been so quiet that Chanele had at first ignored it. A woman in the spartan uniform of the Emporium was standing in the doorway.
Mathilde Lutz, née Mathilde Vogelsang, had been the very first saleswoman that Chanele had employed more than twenty years before. Now, with prematurely grey hair in a severe bun, she looked strict and superior, particularly when she put on the pince-nez that was fastened to her dress with a black velvet band. Back then – could it really have been more than twenty years ago – she had been a lively and, more particularly, a very pretty young girl, with a saucy little beauty spot on her cheek, and many a male customer had come into the shop just for her, on the pretext of having to buy something for his wife. She had soon left the company to marry, but had come back after her husband’s early death, no longer at the counter – there were younger girls there now – but as a kind of governess whose job it was to ensure discipline and good behaviour among the female employees.
Madame Meijer and Frau Lutz were not friends; a general has comrades among his officers, not friends. But they were about the same age, they had experienced the rise of the Emporium together and, even though they had never said as much, shared the conviction that the unpleasant sides of life could not be improved by complaining.
‘Excuse me,’ Frau Lutz said again. ‘I know you prefer to be alone at this time of day. But . . .’
‘What is it?’
Mathilde Lutz was not otherwise inclined to shyness, quite the contrary. When she surprised a young couple kissing or in an even more incriminating situation, she was not lost for words; her sharp tongue struck fear into the shop assistants. But now she shifted uncertainly, almost fearfully, from one foot to the other, as only the young salesgirls normally did when they had been caught committing a small act of theft, and had under threat of immediate dismissal been persuaded to deliver a confession.
‘I wanted . . . It’s . . .’
‘Nu?’ Sometimes without noticing, Madame Meijer was very like old Salomon.
‘We have known each other for a long time now, so I thought it better if I myself . . .’
‘What?’
‘You will find out, sooner or later.’
Chanele sat down, very carefully, as if she didn’t trust the chair. In the gas light, the ink stains on the writing desk looked like dead insects.
‘Mathilde,’ she said, and Frau Lutz, whom her boss had not addressed by her first name in over two decades, tilted her head to one side in embarrassment. It looked as if she wanted to be stroked. The beauty spot on her cheek, Chanele had never noticed it with such clarity, had grown over the years into a wart. ‘Mathilde, what am I about
to find out?’
‘The men . . .’ In her embarrassment Frau Lutz had wrapped the velvet strap of her pince-nez as tightly around one finger as if she were trying to stem a haemorrhage. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. The good lord just made them that way. And Marie-Theres is really very pretty. The one from the blouse department, you know.’
‘I do know my employees,’ said Chanele, and immediately abandoned her dismissive tone. ‘Marie-Theres Furrer, is that right, Mathilde? What’s wrong with her?’
It was hard to believe, but severe Frau Lutz blushed.
‘Pregnant?’ asked Chanele.
‘Pregnant,’ Frau Lutz whispered, and the word came straight from Sodom and Gomorrah.
Chanele – at that moment she was without a doubt Chanele and not Madame Meijer – laughed with relief. ‘Bigger miracles have happened in the world.’
Frau Lutz did not join in with her laughter. ‘But it’s much worse than that,’ she said.
‘Twins?’ Chanele was still laughing.
‘The father. I’ve talked to Furrer, and she told me that the father . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m so sorry that I have to be the one to . . .’
‘Janki,’ Chanele said very quietly and was shocked to realise that she wasn’t surprised at all. Her husband hadn’t called her Mademoiselle Hanna for ages, and she had assumed it was inevitable that he didn’t always sleep alone on his business trips, and what the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over. But here in Baden, in his own shop . . . ‘Is it Janki?’ she asked more loudly.
Frau Lutz looked at her uncomprehendingly. For her, who had only ever known Monsieur Jean Meijer, the name was meaningless.
‘Is it my husband?’
Frau Lutz shook her head. ‘No, Madame Meijer. Of course not. Monsieur Meijer would never . . .’
Chanele waited for a sense of relief and couldn’t find it inside herself. ‘Then who is it?’
The velvet strap tore. The pince-nez fell the floor with a faint clatter and broke. Frau Lutz bent down to collect the splinters and whispered into the floorboards, ‘Young Herr François.’
‘Shmul?’ said Chanele.
17
‘Shmul!’ she would say. ‘François!’ she would say. ‘Did you even think about what that would mean for the company . . .?’
No, that would be wrong. He would just look at her, contemptuous and weary at the same time, eyebrows raised, with that polite smile that he was so good at hiding behind, that smile that she didn’t understand, and which frightened her, even though he was, after all, her own son, the smile of a man who has already lived a lot, when he was only . . .
Old enough to get a silly girl pregnant.
They would have to fire Marie-Theres Furrer.
No. That would make things even worse. They would have to take care of her, perhaps give her some money . . .
‘The Jews always do everything with their money,’ people would say. And if you didn’t offer them any, ‘The Jews are stingy.’
‘Shmul,’ they would say. ‘We will sort this matter out somehow. But we will not tolerate . . .’
We?
Janki would be proud of his son. He wouldn’t admit it, of course he wouldn’t, he would blame him and reproach him, but he wouldn’t be able to conceal his pride. ‘My son! He has my hair and my face, and he is irresistible.’
‘François,’ she would say. ‘You must promise me once and for all . . .’
No. Making promises was second nature to Shmul.
She would tell him what she thought, she would drown him in a mussar sermon until he couldn’t see or hear, she would . . .
She managed not to get round to it for the whole evening.
First of all Janki was waiting for her, in the corridor, he came rushing towards her as soon as she had opened the door to the apartment, as if the guests, who hadn’t even arrived, of course, had been sitting in the drawing room for hours, starving and shuffling their feet. He was so beside himself that for a moment Chanele thought an accident must have happened in the flat. But the faint smell of charred hair came not from a fire, but from the tongs with which Janki had been curling his hair. He came running out of the laundry room in his long shirt, legs bare, because he had retained the habit from his tailoring days of ironing his trousers himself before important occasions, because no one else could do it to his satisfaction. He still had no trousers on, but he was already wearing his tie, a black silk kerchief knotted into a flapping Lavallière.
‘It’s a disaster,’ said Janki, already quite out of breath. ‘You’re far too late, and Salomon has arrived unannounced from Endingen. Of course I’ve invited him to dinner, that is: I had no option. But it means that now we’ll have to . . .’
‘The table is long enough.’ Chanele looked around for Shmul, but he was nowhere to be seen. ‘One place more or less . . .’
‘. . . means we will . . .’ Janki continued in a whisper. ‘. . . that we will be thirteen at table.’
‘Does it say anywhere that that’s forbidden?’
‘Thirteen! Don’t you understand? It’s an unlucky number.’
‘Not for Jews,’ said Chanele.
‘But all the guests are goyim!’
‘Then don’t invite your treyf friends.’ Chanele had other concerns now.
‘Are you even listening?’ Janki raised his hands dramatically to the heavens. It looked as if he was about to tear his hair out. ‘Thirteen! That means . . .’
‘I’ve just been explaining that to Arthur.’ Salomon now emerged from one of the many rooms into the corridor. ‘The gematria of thirteen . . .’
‘Leave me in peace with your gematria!’ yelled Janki.
Salomon made a calming gesture, which had proved itself with many an over-eager guard dog. ‘Nuuu!’ he said, and in this instance it meant: ‘Don’t get yourself worked up!’
‘I’m glad you’ve come to see us, Uncle,’ said Chanele. She still used the old, formal style of address with him. ‘Do you have everything you need?’
‘The shirt is too tight. You wouldn’t tie a rope around a calf’s neck as tight as that.’
‘It’s your size,’ said Janki. ‘I have an eye for it.’
‘But I don’t have the neck for it.’
‘Where is Shmul?’ asked Chanele.
‘François is in his room, I assume. He’ll be getting himself ready.’ His memory jogged, Janki grabbed his Lavallière and tugged the artful knot apart again in a gesture of desperation. ‘Thirteen guests!’ he wailed as plaintively as a cantor on Yom Kippur.
‘Let Arthur eat with us. Then it’ll be fourteen.’
‘Thirteen and a half,’ said Salomon and laughed.
Janki gave him an angry look. ‘Arthur doesn’t yet know how to behave in society.’
‘He will soon. His bar mitzvah is coming up.’
‘Why does Hinda have to be at Mimi’s in Zurich today of all days?’
At that moment Louisli came into the corridor, already wearing the white bonnet and starched apron that she was supposed to wear to serve at table, saw the master of the house standing bare-legged in front of her, pressed her hand to her mouth and fled into the kitchen.
No, Chanele really had no chance of talking to Shmul.
When he heard what was wanted of him, Arthur tried to creep away. Until now, when they had important guests, he had always been allowed to eat in the kitchen, where not every facial expression and every movement were of crucial importance, and when it was just the family he only had to listen to all the thousand admonishments, to keep his back straight, to hold his spoon with only two fingers, to wipe his mouth before he drank from a glass. An official dinner seemed to be as riddled with obstacles as the suit with all the little bells with which Oliver Twist was supposed to learn to steal. Back then, when he had read the book, Fagin had appeared to him in his dreams every night, and Fagin had had Janki’s face, the severe face that Papa made when he wanted to expose one of Arthur’s
shortcomings. He was convinced, and in such matters his imagination knew no bounds, that he would make a fool of himself, would knock over his soup plate or break a glass, that they would look at him reproachfully, all those strange people, and then nod like Cantor Würzburger when Arthur stalled while practising a droosh. ‘We knew all the time,’ they would say.
Chanele needed to persuade her son, needed to promise him a flexed nib for his collection because Arthur also collected nibs, which he arranged according to changing systems, a naturalist looking through a pile of various shells or snails for hidden affinities. Then, when she tried to make him wear the good trousers that had fit without any problems at Pesach, they were too small, the bottoms ridiculously halfway up his calves, and Chanele had to decide to get his bar mitzvah suit – which had already been prepared but not of course worn – out of the cupboard and thus exacerbate Arthur’s anxiety still further. Any stain on that suit, he knew, would be a calamity that he would never live down for the rest of his life.
Then Louisli, who had been put in a flap by all the excitement in the house, had to be calmed down as well. The dining room had to be checked and instructions given for an altered seating plan. The big table was massive and imposing, and equipped with a modern mechanism that meant it could be extended to twice its length, ‘with only one hand’, as Janki proudly stressed. The table top – tropical wood! – was hidden under the white damask tablecloth, but one could very faintly catch the scent of the walnut oil with which it was regularly rubbed. When Arthur was even younger, Chanele had once caught him licking the top of the table with his tongue. ‘It’s an experiment,’ he had said.
The table groaned, as it was supposed to, with nouveau riche abundance. The Sarreguemines porcelain – they had enough for twenty people – paraded in a double column, the silver cutlery gleamed and the crystal glasses whose fragility Arthur so dreaded waited around for the lighting of the candles, like debutantes in sequined dresses waiting to display their full beauty. The wine bottles were lined up on the sideboard, a guard of honour for the silver tantalus, which still lacked a key.
Melnitz Page 19