Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Papa, he learned, had come home in a rage, more furious than anyone could remember, had shouted for Chanele and later for François, and had then locked himself in with them both in the dining room, had slammed the door so violently that a picture fell off the wall in the corridor, the painting of the bearded man in the funny shack. ‘It’s a sukkah,’ Arthur thought, ‘a rabbi in a sukkah,’ and nearly said it out loud. This painting – Christine now leaned it carefully against a chair – that couldn’t just have been left lying on the floor, would have been an excuse for Louisli if someone had caught her listening at the door. Christine, the first to go out and check what was going on, had actually heard Janki yelling something about fornication, about shame being brought down on his house, and when she said that in the kitchen Louisli had turned quite pale. She had then crept out herself, even though her legs were trembling with excitement, and at first she hadn’t understood anything, not just because Janki’s voice kept breaking with fury, but because he had lapsed into a language that she didn’t know, it sounded like ordinary German, and then again it didn’t, and it was only the answers that François had given that made her understand that they weren’t talking about her. She had been so worried about being sent home under a cloud of shame and insults, that her people would never, never have forgiven her, and she would have been seen as the village slut for ever and ever, but then, when she realised that they weren’t even talking about her, it had actually been much worse, to know that François had another and perhaps many more, a salesgirl in the Emporium who was even expecting his child.

  It was, even before his bar mitzvah, really the day when Arthur grew up.

  Louisli stood for a long time at the dining room door, still holding the painting, but she couldn’t hear much more. Then she had had to run away because she had heard footsteps, probably Hinda. Her room was right at the end of the corridor, but such a racket must have been audible all the way there. And there wouldn’t have been any point listening any longer, because what she heard went around in a circle, so to speak, always the same: Janki swore and threatened, François made excuses, didn’t understand why everyone was so worked up, and Chanele only spoke occasionally, always very calmly and in very few words. And then Janki started shouting again.

  Christine, who knew men, was a little surprised, because in her estimation of Janki, she said, she would never have thought that he could get so worked up about such a matter.

  Louisli sniffed into her sleeve and said it wasn’t just such a matter, it had broken her heart at any rate, and she would never get over it her whole life long.

  Christine said, ‘Ha!’ and smiled her boxer’s laugh.

  But in the kitchen they didn’t know everything, and even Janki and François, the ones most affected, knew only a part.

  In fact what had happened was the following:

  In the afternoon, just as Janki was serving two particularly good customers, Frau Wiederkehr – ‘of the rich Wiederkehrs’ – and Frau Strähle, the wife of the manager of the Verenahof, Herr Rauhut the editor came into the shop, never having been in it before, and demanded to talk to Janki, right away, he would not be put off. ‘In private, please: I’m sure you don’t want everyone to know what I have to discuss with you.’ Janki explained to him that he really had no time right now, he said it quite politely, and even made a little joke, to the effect that the customer was queen as far he was concerned, and anyone who didn’t want to fall out of favour would be well advised not to leave his monarch rudely in the lurch, but Rauhut insisted, he even became impertinent – ‘When he is sober, which isn’t often, the chap’s even more unbearable!’ – and said at last that he didn’t care himself, as far as he was concerned they could go on talking in public, because sooner or later it would appear in the Tagblatt anyway. And then he asked, in front of Frau Wiederkehr and Frau Strähle – who of course would tell her husband, and then one might as well put it in the paper without further ado – just asked straight out: ‘Is it true, Herr Meijer, that the salesgirl Marie-Theres Furrer of the Modern Emporium is expecting your child?’

  Janki had never heard the name – ‘You are aware that I don’t know all the women who work in my shops!’ – but Rauhut refused to believe him, he had it from a good source, a very good source, that there had been some hanky-panky, if he might use the term. And he had been told that the girl was pregnant, one could in fact see it with the naked eye. He as an editor was at the service of the public, and the public had a right to be informed and warned regardless of the status of the person if things happened in town which were irreconcilable with public morals.

  Janki contradicted, denied, even pleaded. He remembered only too well the newspaper article that had almost ruined him on the day of the Drapery opening. But Rauhut stood his ground and referred repeatedly to his source, whom he could not name, but who was reliable, absolutely reliable. And all that in front of the greedy ears of Frau Wiederkehr and Frau Strähle, who clearly couldn’t wait to pass on the story and spread it around, not as an unproven accusation, of course, but as a documented fact.

  At last, and even that had – me neshumah! – not been easy to achieve, Rauhut declared himself willing to wait another few days with his article, but if by then he had no proof to the contrary, clear and unambiguous proof to the contrary . . . Verbatim, he said, ‘I will have no option,’ and anyone who speaks as pompously as that, Janki said, has evil on his mind. And generally speaking: how, excuse me, is one supposed to prove that something hasn’t happened?

  Chanele heard all of this very calmly, so calmly that it made Janki really mad, and then said only a single sentence.

  And Janki leapt to his feet and yelled for François.

  His son came in smiling, and when Janki noisily slammed the door shut, his polite smile grew even wider, as when one tightens the rubber string of a carnival mask. Because Janki demanded as much, he sat down, but only with half his bottom, as though purely out of courtesy.

  Janki set the walking stick with the lion’s-head handle down at an angle on the table in front of him, and rested both hands on it. ‘If you were a goy . . .’ he began, and had probably, while waiting for François, honed his rebukes to a very sharp point. But his rage was greater, and he started shouting in a voice that was constantly on the point of breaking. ‘But you aren’t a goy! You’re a Jew, and a Jew must behave respectably!’

  ‘So?’ said François, looking in his pocket for his case of Russian cigarettes.

  ‘You’re not going to smoke now, are you?’

  A shrug. ‘If it bothers you, Papa . . .’

  Chanele noticed without any great surprise that something had changed in her. Francois’ smile, which had frightened her so because of its strangeness, was no longer threatening since it had reminded her of something. The man in the insane asylum, the one with the tailcoat over his bare chest, had smiled just like that when he had said, ‘I’m incognito here.’

  ‘Why did you have to go and start something with the nafka?’ Janki yelled.

  ‘Louisli?’ François asked the question in an off-handed, throw-away manner as if to say, ‘What are you getting worked up about? It’s nothing more than a coffee stain on a tablecloth.’

  ‘Her too? This has got to stop! Is that clear? It will stop right now! No, I’m talking about this . . . about this . . . Chanele, what’s her name again?’

  ‘Marie-Theres Furrer.’

  ‘Oh, that one. You’d like her too.’ François nodded to his father as if to say, ‘If you wanted, we could have a nice little secret together.’

  ‘I don’t even know her!’ roared Janki. ‘And the whole town is saying I’ve got her pregnant. Don’t laugh! Stop laughing this instant! It’s going to be in the paper! And all just because you . . . because you . . .’

  ‘Is she pregnant?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chanele.

  ‘Well, it’ll cost a bit of money. We’re not poor people.’

  Janki brought his walking stick down so hard on the table
that the handle came off. The lion’s head turned a number of somersaults and then came to a stop in front of François, sticking its tongue out in mockery.

  ‘We will become poor people!’ yelled Janki. ‘If people boycott us, we might as well shut up shop! You have no idea of the damage such an article can do. You are nothing and you know nothing and you haven’t experienced anything! The only thing you can do is unbutton your trousers and be an idiot!’

  Janki’s rage, even though François was its butt, was directed much more at Herr Rauhut, against all the Rauhuts, against the whole town, against a world in which one could take as much trouble as one wanted, in which one could pedal frantically and do everything correctly and then all it took was a rumour, a single unmerited suspicion, to destroy everything one had built up over twenty years. François was not yet a real man, he could afford to make a mistake; at his age such things were practically expected of him. ‘Young blood’, people would have said, half in blame and half in admiration, women would have given him sidelong looks and dreamed up stories in which they themselves played the lead role, men would have been a bit envious and then, if word had got out that they had treated the girl decently, with an appropriate sum, the matter would have disappeared, once and for all, forgiven and forgotten. But now people thought he had been messing around with the girl, a girl twenty-five years younger than he was himself, and an employee to boot, which made it doubly contemptible. Above all it would now become public, not just something one talked about over brandy and cigars after the ladies had withdrawn. Now it would have consequences. Janki was not François. He was no longer a young rake, he belonged to society, or he nearly did, he would have belonged to it long since if he only went to church on Sunday and not to the prayer room on Shabbos, and in society the rules were stricter. His customers, those arrogant small-town queens whom he had been courting for two decades, would stay away, and if they didn’t stay away they would turn up their peasant noses, they would look at him like . . . like . . . like a salesman, a quite ordinary tailor, someone who has to be subservient, whom one uses when one needs him, but that’s all. Now he would never belong to it.

  That was why Janki shouted so loudly.

  Then when Hinda came in and wanted to know what was going on, he was already quite out of breath, he had cursed François a thousand times and forbidden him a thousand things – he was not allowed to go out of the house except to work, they would soon see who was in charge around here – but he had not solved the actual problem: how does one make a rumour disappear?

  ‘Don’t worry, Hinda, my ray of sunshine,’ he tried to lie. ‘We are only discussing a business matter. An unpleasant matter, but nothing for you to worry about. How were things in Zurich?’

  But Janki’s veins were swollen, and he was as red in the face as Councillor Bugmann. François had fixed his eyes on a point where there was nothing to see, and the smile was frozen on his face. Chanele sat straight-backed on her chair and seemed to be waiting for something.

  ‘I would prefer to tell you about Zurich later,’ Hinda said quickly. ‘For now I want to check that we’re having dinner this evening.’

  When she had left, Janki picked up the broken lion’s head and tried hopelessly to fix it back to the stick. ‘Do you think I can glue it back on?’ he asked in a sad voice.

  ‘If you let me do it,’ said Chanele, ‘I’ll sort everything out.’

  29

  ‘Three thousand francs?’

  Herr Ziltener’s hands were clenched behind his back in an attempt to ensure that he didn’t touch Chanele’s desk even by accident. Her office was so small that any conversation carried out behind closed doors assumed an inadvertently intimate character, a kind of familiarity with which this sober accountant was extremely uncomfortable.

  ‘Three thousand francs? The boss said nothing to me about that.’

  ‘Because he doesn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘In that case I can’t . . .’

  ‘Yes, you can, Herr Ziltener,’ said Chanele, and realised to her own surprise how much she had been looking forward to this moment. ‘You have authority to deal in sums up to this figure.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘My husband granted you that authority on the assumption that you are capable of conducting transactions of this magnitude without having to request his instructions.’

  ‘Three thousand francs . . . not a small matter.’ Herr Ziltener wasn’t stammering, but he wasn’t far off.

  ‘If you feel it’s too much for you,’ Chanele went on, a little ashamed that she was enjoying the situation so much, ‘my husband and I will fully understand if you prefer to leave our company and seek a less demanding post elsewhere.’

  ‘You’re going . . .?’ The stammer was threateningly close. ‘You want to dismiss me?’

  Not at all, Herr Ziltener. Certainly not. Who would want to dispense with such a reliable and discreet member of staff?’ Chanele waited until Ziltener’s shoulders relaxed with relief, and then added as if in passing:

  ‘Unless, of course, you found that you were not in a position to follow my instructions.’

  Ziltener silently moved his lips, a schoolboy going through a calculation over and over again so as not to reach the wrong result. ‘I could . . . I could . . .’

  ‘Yes, my dear Herr Ziltener?’

  ‘I could of course fetch the money from the bank and then have it confirmed by the boss later on . . .’

  ‘That would not be a good solution.’

  The schoolboy had worked out the calculation so carefully, and still no praise from the teacher.

  ‘Not a good . . .?’

  ‘I do not wish my husband to know anything about this sum.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’ In his excitement the accountant had repeatedly clutched his head; his thin hair, which he had combed over his bald patch with painstaking precision, was now standing up in all directions.

  ‘Regrettable. But if you say so. Many thanks, Herr Ziltener. That will be all.’

  Ziltener didn’t go, of course he didn’t. He stopped by the desk and uneasily fiddled with his paper sleeves. For a moment the nervous rustling was the only sound.

  ‘If the boss finds out, he will fire me,’ he said at last, and his eyes were huge with anxiety.

  ‘If he finds out, I will fire you.’ Chanele had borrowed Francois’ smile for this conversation, ruthlessly polite and politely ruthless.

  One could actually watch Ziltener struggling with the problem. His jaw worked; he had to chew on the bitter pill that she had given him to swallow.

  At last he lowered his head and gave in. ‘But it’s all in order?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course, my dear Herr Ziltener,’ Chanele said in a friendly voice. ‘It’s all in order.’

  During the time that the accountant needed to go to the bank, contrary to all custom, Chanele sat idly at her desk. If someone had come in unannounced – which of course no one would have dared to do – he would have wondered why Madame Meijer was smiling so dreamily.

  Madame Meijer. Yes, she had finally grown into that name.

  The first part of her plan had worked exactly as she had planned. Simply rebuking François, telling him that things could not go on this way, that he had to change his life, would have been utterly pointless. No support could have been expected from Janki either. He wouldn’t have taken the whole matter seriously, she was sure of it, he would have seen Francois’ affair as a little slip, as he saw everything his golden boy did, he might even have been proud of him. For men such stories were like a game, and everyone wanted to be on the winning side.

  But now that Janki himself had fallen under suspicion . . .

  And when he was firmly convinced that François was to blame . . .

  It had not been easy to persuade Mathilde Lutz to join in. She hadn’t at first wanted to play the part that Chanele had assigned to her, but of course in the end she had given in. It wasn’t hard to manipulate people; one only had to take
the trouble to find out how they worked.

  And one mustn’t feel sorry for them.

  So that evening Mathilde had gone to the Crown. It could equally have been the Golden Eagle or the Edelweiss, because Herr Rauhut the editor was bound to turn up at each pub in town sooner or later in the course of the evening. She had sat down alone at a table, as far as possible from the hustle and bustle of the regular guests. She had put on a hat with a thick black veil, an old hat that she had kept from her husband’s funeral, even though that was already many years ago. The veil had been Mathilde’s own idea. It wasn’t customary for decent women to visit a pub unaccompanied, and anyone who has a rumour to spread does not want to fall victim to another.

  Rauhut arrived at half past eight, sat down at the regulars’ table where he was greeted with a loud ‘Hallo’, and was served his half of red without having to order it. As if merely continuing a conversation that had just been interrupted, he had immediately involved himself in a violent debate in which he outdid everyone, in the loudness of his arguments at least. He seemed to have settled at the table, and in the end Frau Lutz had to ask the waiter, who was already on his way with his next half litre, to tell the editor as inconspicuously as possible that there was someone here who had interesting information for him.

  When he joined her, she began by complimenting him, exactly as Chanele had commissioned her to do, told him that she never missed one of his articles signed ‘fr’ (his first name was Ferdinand) in the Tagblatt, and had often thought how nice it was that at least one person in this city had the courage to say in the newspaper how things really were. Rauhut accepted the praise as no more than his due.

  ‘Then, when you tell him the story,’ Chanele had further instructed Mathilde, ‘do it haltingly, like someone who might have decided to reveal a secret, but who is tormented by her conscience.’ Mathilde didn’t have to dissemble to create this impression. One does not betray one’s king without palpitations, and she still saw Monsieur Meijer, with his elegant manners and his injury from the Franco-German war, as having something majestic about him.