Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Désirée had also stopped parting her hair normally in the middle, although that girlishly simple cut had rather suited her even face. She tried out a great variety of hairdos, and even gave her mother a great deal of fun by trying out all the hats in Mimi’s well-equipped wardrobe. But they were all too fussy, and a simple bolero with a little blue Atlas silk wing trim suited her much better. The hat was also from François’s shop, which now had the best selection, even though one had actually decided not to shop there any more.

  The interesting thing about this matter was that Désirée changed more and more, while Esther Weill showed not a sign of her mysterious liaison. She remained what Mimi called an ‘uninteresting girl’, not pretty and not ugly, not particularly clever and not particularly stupid. Sometimes when she dropped by to play piano duets with Désirée – she had to take piano lessons too, although unlike her friend she really hadn’t the slightest talent for it – Mimi would drop a tiny hint, although without picking up so much as an echo. Such a one as Esther Weill was just wrongly cast as the novel character whose adventures Mimi experienced in sometimes daily instalments.

  Even though Mimi wasn’t curious at all, she was tormented by the fact that she still didn’t know the male lead in this novel. But on this point Désirée remained stubborn. ‘I have given my promise,’ she said, ‘and no one will shift me from it.’

  Mimi was really annoyed that Pinchas had switched to the Orthodox Community, because it couldn’t be one of them, they were all far too pious. She would really – but this would have attracted attention – have liked to seize the opportunity to go to the synagogue on Löwenstrasse to look from the women’s loft with her Argus-eyes at the young men of the community. ‘But I’ll find out in the end,’ she thought, and was by now already firmly convinced that she had uncovered the story simply thanks to her superior knowledge of human nature. She had already completely forgotten about the coincidence of the closed booth.

  Until Pinchas mentioned that precise story over dinner, just by chance.

  ‘I don’t know if you know about this,’ he said. ‘A very strange crime was committed a few weeks ago, right here in the city. In a booth on the Platzspitz some circus person was exhibiting some sort of giant fish . . .’

  ‘A whale,’ said Mimi. ‘It’s a mammal.’

  ‘Do you remember the story?’

  No, said Mimi, she didn’t remember, it had just been a general observation.

  ‘At any rate, this whale, which is said to have been so big that you could actually have had a picnic on it – anyway, one day the skeleton was no longer complete. Someone had stolen the lower jaw. Do you really not remember?’

  Désirée had never heard of it either.

  ‘This bone, which must have been almost a metre long . . .’

  ‘Almost three metres,’ said Désirée, and quickly added that someone in school had been talking about whales and that she seemed to remember that their jaws . . .

  ‘In any case: one day this bone had suddenly disappeared.’

  ‘Really?’ said Mimi, and Désirée was very surprised as well.

  ‘This skeleton was to an extent the exhibitor’s livelihood, so he had had it insured. With Sally Steigrad. It was insured for a considerable sum, and now he wanted to claim on it on the grounds that an incomplete skeleton had lost all value. But now a witness has been found, I have this from Sally himself, who saw this famous Herr Zehntenhaus himself dragging the jaw out of the booth and throwing it in the Limmat. Business wasn’t going very well, so he wanted to . . . A simple case of insurance fraud! What do you think of that?’

  It was unbelievable, the things people came up with, said Désirée. And Mimi added, ‘Secrets like that are utterly pointless. Everything comes out sooner or later.’

  41

  For the first holiday trip of his life, Janki had himself measured for three new suits. In one, with a black frock coat and striped trousers, he looked like a diplomat, and also, when trying it on, checked that the sleeves didn’t slip back too far if one doffed one’s hat politely on a spa promenade. With the second he opted, after a long, expert discussion with the tailor, for a sporty, American style, with a matching button-down waistcoat, which was worn this season with shirts with a Caruso collar, not particularly comfortable, but the high cut forced one to hold one’s head very straight, and that gave one’s whole figure an elegant air. Thirdly, he ordered a very light beach suit: trousers of white English flannel and a double-breasted navy blue jacket, along with a sailor’s cap with an embroidered ribbon and white beach shoes, which François had to order him specially from a supplier in England. In case of high winds – and on the North Sea one had to expect such things – there was a tennis coat of heavy white frieze, and while he was about it, he also bought a few small items, not absolutely necessary but elegant, a small box containing some particularly soft travelling slippers, for example, or a practical double clamp with which one could fasten one’s straw hat to the lapel of one’s coat on hot days. What was the point of co-owning a store if one didn’t take advantage of it?

  Chanele, in her intractable way, didn’t want to buy anything new at all at first, she already had more than enough unworn dresses in her wardrobe, and where did it say in the Shulchan Orech that you had to dress up like a trained monkey only to get sand in your shoes on some godforsaken island? She wouldn’t listen to any of Janki’s arguments, either that after working for so many years one could allow oneself a treat, or that one couldn’t turn up at the table d’hôte like a nebbish from the provinces, and only gave in when she was persuaded by Mina, who was much more sensible about these matters than her mother-in-law. In the end she had a bathing costume of heavy napped cheviot forced on her, a dress and jacket made in silk according to the latest Paris fashion, and for bad weather a rubber mackintosh in a Raglan cut. Janki also tried to persuade her to have a loden suit in the Bozen style, but Chanele said she didn’t intend either to go climbing mountains or to learn to yodel.

  Then, of course, their two trunks weren’t enough, and at the last minute François also had to buy a big leather suitcase for them. It was so new that all the contents later smelled as if they had had Russian leather perfume poured all over them. François didn’t come to the station; he avoided meeting his Jewish family more than absolutely necessary, they had nothing to say to each other, and every time his mood was spoiled by the way everyone tried so hard to talk to him normally and without reproach.

  But the others were there. Mimi, as excited as if her friend and her husband were setting off on an expedition to the sources of the Nile, kept saying over and over again: ‘Be very careful, please be very careful.’ She found it hard to cope with the August heat, and every time she dabbed away the sweat she tried to pretend it was tears of farewell.

  Pinchas had brought a food parcel with him for their journey, including a dry sausage which smelled so strongly of garlic that Janki, even when he was thanking him for it, decided to leave it in the compartment at the first possible opportunity. ‘So that you have something kosher with you,’ said Pinchas, and it could also have been heard as a reproach. In Westerland – they didn’t talk about it, but everyone had thought about it – everything would be chazer-treyf. Mimi darted him an accusatory glance – ‘Sometimes he can be so tactless!’ – and by way of distraction began to complain about her housemaid, whom she would probably have to fire because the goy preferred to read the paper rather than dust under the furniture.

  Désirée had appeared in an embroidered white voile dress which made Lea and Rachel so envious that they whispered to each other that they wouldn’t want to be given something like that, it made you look like a little doll, and the slightest stain would ruin the marvellous thing in a second. Of the Kamionkers, only Hinda and the two girls were there; Ruben was already studying in Kolomea, and Zalman, who had just taken a new job, couldn’t just stay away from it in the middle of the week.

  Arthur had assembled a little travelling pharmacy for his pa
rents, ‘just in case’, and Mimi found that so touchingly considerate of him that she had to dab away her tears or her sweat all over again and say, ‘Take care, for heaven’s sake take care.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to them?’ Mina didn’t like emotional outbursts. Since having polio as a child, she had had to watch and listen to far too much, and like someone with a subscription ticket who goes to the same theatre three times a week, she had become more sensitive to wrong notes with every passing year.

  The locomotive spat smoke. Lea and Rachel were already waiting with mischievous delight for the first specks of soot on Désirée’s white dress, when all of a sudden Alfred turned up as well. He didn’t greet anyone, he didn’t even look his relatives in the face, but only held out a package of gingerbread to Chanele, ‘for the journey’, doffed his student cap and then, because the stationmaster was already trilling excitedly on his whistle, and slamming the doors to the compartment with an official expression on his face, he gave his mother his arm and walked along the platform with her to the exit, he ramrod straight and she bent-backed, Mina hobbling from side to side as always, as if she were drunk. She had always worn very wide skirts so that people couldn’t clearly see how she had to swing her paralysed leg around in a semi-circle with each step she took. The whole family watched the ill-matched pair with such fascination that at first no one noticed the train setting off. And then they all ran after the carriage, waving furiously.

  ‘A terrible person, that Alfred,’ said Lea to Désirée, but a speck of soot had just landed on Désirée’s white dress, and she had to concentrate on removing it again with her fingertips.

  The Meijers were travelling first class. It was meshuga expensive, but they could afford it, and although Chanele protested – ‘Since when have we been called Rothschild?’ – she was quite glad that they had a compartment all to themselves for the very long journey. In Baden-Oos, where the train stopped for a few minutes, she looked yearningly out of the window; if Janki hadn’t set his sights on Sylt, of all places, they would have been at their destination already. A cure was a cure in the end, and whether you were getting bored in a thermal spa or on the beach, it didn’t really make much difference, at least to her.

  Janki’s leg hurt from sitting down for so long, and even his travelling slippers brought him no relief, but because he had been the one who decided that this beach resort and no other was the right one, he couldn’t show his complaints.

  He had never admitted the true reason for his choice to Chanele: in the Journal des Modes, which he studied each month from the first page to the last, it had said that the Austrian imperial court tailor Kniže spent the summer months on Sylt in Westerland every year, and Kniže was, where elegance and social correctness were concerned, the measure of all things at the time. He was even – and this had only ever previously been reported of François Delormes – said to have refused to make a pair of trousers for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, just because the successor to the throne had insisted on a cut that Kniže considered unsuitable.

  Eventually – ‘I’d rather clean up for Pesach three times in a row than ever endure such a journey again!’ – they ended up in Hamburg, where Janki had reserved a room with running water at the Vier Jahreszeiten, another waste of time, and just for an overnight stay. He had firmly resolved to spare nothing on this journey. You don’t sell your business only to mortify yourself afterwards.

  The next day they had to cram themselves back onto a train, a little branch line to a backwater called Hoyerschleuse, from where the steamer left for Sylt. There was only one first-class compartment, with ancient upholstery that smelled damp and rotten as if a few farmers had been comparing samples of manure on the previous journey. The railway official Janki wanted to complain to about it spoke such broad dialect that no normal person could have understood a word.

  To top it all, they didn’t even have the compartment to themselves. Just before the train set off, they were joined by a distracted-looking man, immediately identifiable as an old soldier even though he was wearing civilian clothes. He excused himself very correctly for the disturbance, but in such a clipped and flippant voice that his apology, for all the politeness of the words, sounded more like an attack.

  Their new fellow passenger sat down opposite Janki and Chanele, and at first there was one of those unpleasant pauses in which etiquette dictates that one pays no attention to a person even though he is sitting right in front of one. The man, about Janki’s age, wore a hunting suit of dark-green loden, and his hat, which he had raised briefly to Chanele when he got in, was decorated with a little feather. An ugly, brownish, discoloured scar ran from his left eye almost all the way to his chin. ‘It must be a schmiss from one of those idiotic student fraternities,’ thought Janki. ‘It’s a shame we can’t show it to Alfred, he’d soon lose his taste for such goyim naches.’

  The man noticed Janki’s gaze, probably read his thoughts as well, and said in a booming voice, ‘Grenade splinter. 1870. Sedan.’

  And without thinking, Janki replied, ‘Sedan? I was there too.’

  ‘Really?’ The man could not have beamed more happily at Janki if he had been his long lost brother. He immediately leapt to his feet, which meant that Janki couldn’t help getting up too, and because the compartment wasn’t very spacious, the two men were standing as close together as if they were about to hug and kiss. But in the end they only shook hands and sat back down in their seats with the awkwardness of people unaccustomed to intimacy.

  ‘No one will ever believe it!’ said the man. He had shed his parade-ground voice as abruptly as one loosens a tight collar among friends, and a South German twinge could now be heard in his voice. ‘Absolutely mind-boggling.’ There could be no doubt. This was the strongest expression of surprise that he could think of.

  He stared in amazement at Janki, shaking his head, as if Janki couldn’t possibly exist, let alone in this train, and then leapt back up again, he couldn’t stay in his seat, doffed his hat and introduced himself, ‘Staudinger’.

  ‘Meijer,’ said Janki. To be quite correct he should probably have got to his feet as well, but there was simply too little room between the seats. So he just inclined his head and gestured vaguely to Chanele. ‘My wife.’

  Staudinger pulled his hat from his head again and clicked his heels together. Then he bent over Chanele’s hand and pressed a kiss upon it, not an elegant hint at a kiss, but a real one, smacking and damp. ‘It is an honour, Frau Meijer,’ he said. ‘It is a joy. The wife of a comrade-in-arms.’

  ‘Do sit down,’ said Chanele, who was already feeling ill from the shaking of the train and the mouldy smell of the upholstery.

  Staudinger sat down, repeated once again that the hen in the pan would go crazy, and then leapt back up again. ‘Fifth Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Second Battalion,’ he announced this time. ‘Based in Aschaffenburg. And you, Comrade?’

  ‘Twentieth Corps. Second Division. Fourth Batallion of the Régiment du Haut Rhin. Based in Colmar.’

  ‘Colmar? But that wasn’t even . . .’

  ‘I am a Frenchman,’ said Janki.

  Staudinger sat down again as suddenly as if someone had kicked him in the back of the knees.

  ‘You were . . .?’

  ‘On the other side,’ said Janki, gripping the handle of his walking stick more firmly.

  But Staudinger was enthusiastic. ‘This is amazing!’ he said. ‘Absolutely mind . . . Where did your regiment fight?’

  Chanele held her handkerchief in front of her face, probably because of the unpleasant smell. Janki had been asked so often by admiring lady customers to tell them about his heroic warlike deeds that he was not lost for an answer. ‘A soldier goes where he is sent,’ he said. ‘When the bullets are flying around your head, you don’t ask questions about geography.’

  ‘Correct,’ said Staudinger. ‘Absolutely correct. We were all young at the time, and didn’t know that we’d have to talk about it for the rest of our lives.’
r />   ‘Which you probably enjoy doing more than I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You won the war.’

  Staudinger let out a barking ‘Ha!’ which was probably supposed to be a cordial, comradely laugh. ‘Very good. Really very good. I’ll have to remember that one. “You won the war.”’ Again he said ‘Ha!’ and that seemed to get the preliminaries out of the way as far as he was concerned, and he started relating his own experiences of the war. ‘We were standing at the Porte de Mézières. Have you heard of it? No? Well, it wasn’t right at the front as such, but it was a strategically very important point that absolutely had to be held. I can list the positions if you like. Well, perhaps another time. We will see each other again, I hope. Are you bound for Sylt as well? Westerland? Me too. We’ll absolutely have to . . . Which hotel? The Atlantic? On Herrenbadstrasse, I know. An elegant place, very distinguished, not everyone can afford it. I certainly can’t. Ha!’ He performed his laugh as if it were a duty, and then continued with his monologue, which he had doubtless delivered many times, word for word. ‘So our emplacement was at this gate, along with the first Battalion and a company of riflemen that had been assigned to us, and the grenades were flying over our heads. If you were there, you know the sound, that whoosh that gets louder and louder until you want to bury yourself in the ground. But we had an old colonel, Niedermayer was his name, a proper, cosy old Bavarian, never promoted beyond a certain point because of some old story or other, even though he was very hard working, he just laughed when we threw ourselves down, and said, “If you can hear them, they’ve already gone past.” And that was exactly how it was with me. I never heard the grenade that got me. Didn’t hear it at all, just imagine. Only my face was suddenly very hot, no pain, nothing at all at first, just that feeling of heat, and something damp ran over my hands; at first I thought my flask had been hit. But it was my own blood. So I was only vaguely aware of most of it, the French waving their white flags like mad, I don’t want to be rude, but that was how it was, and the peace negotiator coming through our ranks . . . But you’ll know all that. Until at last the medical corps came and . . .’ He suddenly broke off and looked at Janki with a slightly suspicious expression. ‘Were you injured too?’