Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘Tomorrow I must leave the house at four,’ said Salomon. ‘You can wrap up all the leftover cake for my journey.’

  ‘Almost all. A piece must be left for me.’ Chanele, whose uncertain position in the household had made her a good observer, knew precisely when she could risk such pert little remarks. Now Salomon had eaten well; that meant that he was in a benevolent mood.

  ‘Nu, so be it, part of the leftovers.’

  Mimi pushed away her crumbled cake. ‘I don’t know why you all like it so much. It tastes ordinaire.’ She spoke the word with lips pursed, to stress the Frenchness of the word.

  Golde took the plate, looked at it darkly – ‘the waste!’ her expression said – and put it with the other crockery that Chanele would later wash up. ‘Where are you off to tomorrow?’ she asked her husband, not out of genuine interest, but because an eyshes chayil asks the right questions.

  ‘To Degermoos. The young farmer, Stalder, has said he wants to talk to me. I can imagine what it’s about. He’s running out of hay. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him he’s putting too many cows out on his poor land. Now he wants me to buy them back. But I’m not buying. Who needs cows when the grass isn’t growing yet?’

  ‘And that’s why you’re going? Not to do a deal?’

  ‘Not this deal. There’s someone in Vogelsang with cow-pest in his herd. He has too much hay. I’ll tell Stalder, and he can stock up.’

  ‘What do you get out of it?’

  ‘Nothing today. And perhaps nothing tomorrow, either. But the day after tomorrow . . .’ Salomon ran his fingers through his sideburns, because of the cake-crumbs and because he was pleased with himself. ‘Sooner or later he’ll have a beheimes to sell, and it’ll be an animal that I can use. I’ll make him an offer, and he’ll take it because he’ll think to himself: “The Jew with the brolly is a decent fellow.” And then I will do my deal.’

  The business with the brolly was this: whenever Salomon Meijer travelled across the country he carried with him a fat black umbrella, tied at the top so that the fabric puffed out like a bag. He used the umbrella as a walking stick, pressed it firmly down on to the ground with each step and left an unmistakeable trail on muddy paths or in the snow: the impressions of two hobnailed soles and to the right of them a row of holes as regular as the ones a tidy farmer’s wife would make when planting beans. The special thing about the umbrella, the thing people talked about, was that Salomon never opened it, whatever the weather. Even when the rain was cascading down as if the time had come for a new Noah and a new Ark, Salomon just drew his hat lower over his forehead, if it got very bad, pulled the tails of his long coat over his head and walked on, leaning on the umbrella and drilling the tip into the ground with every second step, so that the rain collected in a row of little lakes behind him. He was known because of this around Endingen, and laughed at because of it too, and if, like red-haired Moische, he had had a shop-sign painted, to bring customers to the right place it would have had to say not ‘Cattle-trading Sal. Meijer’, but ‘The Jew with the Brolly’.

  Salomon belched pleasurably, as if after the big Shabbos sude, when it is practically a mitzvah, a god-pleasing act, to eat too much. Mimi pulled a face and murmured something to herself that was probably French but certainly contemptuous. Salomon took a pinch from his snuff-box, screwed up his nose and contorted his face into a grimace and finally sneezed, loudly and with a great sense of relief. ‘Now there’s only one thing I need,’ he said, and looked around expectantly. Chanele, since they would probably go on sitting in the kitchen for a while, had gone into the parlour to fetch the second paraffin lamp, and now she drew an earthenware bottle from one apron pocket, a pewter mug from the other, and set them both in front of him. ‘She can do magic like the Witch of Endor,’ Salomon said contentedly and poured himself a drink.

  Then the conversation in the kitchen had fallen asleep, as a child suddenly falls asleep in the middle of a game. Chanele washed the crockery in the big brown wooden bucket; it clattered as if in the distance. Golde put the dried plates back in the cupboard, took the few steps individually for each plate, back and forth, a dance without a partner, to which Salomon, eyes closed, droned a tune, more out of repletion than musicality. Mimi reproachfully brushed invisible crumbs from her dressing gown and wondered whether she shouldn’t have chosen a different fabric; she had only taken this one because the shopkeeper had called it ‘dove-grey’, such a beautiful, soft, gleaming word. Dove-grey.

  At the house next door – which was actually the same house yet a different one because the law demanded as much, at the other entrance of the house, then, there was a sudden hammering on the door, impatient and violent, as one knocks at the midwife’s door when someone is entering the world, or at the door of the chevra, the funeral fraternity, when someone is leaving it. It was not a time of day when people in Endingen paid a visit, either to Jews or to goyim. In the other half of the house, with its own front door and its own stairs, to meet the requirements of the law according to which Christians and Jews were not allowed to live in the same house, their landlord lived, the tailor Oggenfuss, with his wife and three children, peaceful people if you knew how to take them. They were good neighbours, which meant that they benignly ignored one another. The death of Uncle Melnitz, and all the mourners who had come to the house for seven days, had gone assiduously unnoticed by the Oggenfuss household, with the practised blindness of people who live closer together than they would really like to. And even now, when something unusual was going on, something practically sensational by Endingen standards, in the Meijers’ kitchen they merely looked quizzically at one another, and already Salomon shrugged his shoulders and said ‘So!’ – which in this case meant something like, ‘They can break the door down if they want to, it has nothing to do with us.’

  Footsteps were heard next door, a restless to-ing and fro-ing, from which, if one had been curious, one might have worked out that someone who had already gone to bed was looking for a candle, a spill, to light it from the embers of the oven fire, a shawl, to cover their night-shirt, then the shutter clattered against the wall, a noise that really belonged to early morning, and Oggenfuss, as unfriendly as fearful people are in unfamiliar situations, asked what was so urgent and what sort of behaviour was that, dragging people out of bed in the middle of the night.

  A strange, hoarse voice, interrupted by a bad cough, gave an unintelligible answer. Oggenfuss, switching from Aargau dialect to High German, replied. The stranger repeated his sentence, from which one could now make out the words ‘please’ and ‘visit’, but in such an unusual accent that Mimi said with delight, ‘It’s a Frenchman.’

  ‘Sha!’ said Golde. She stood there with an empty bowl in her hand, in the open kitchen door, where the corridor acted as an amplifier, so that even if one wasn’t curious, one could hear everything going on in the street. But all that came from outside now was the coughing of the nocturnal visitor. Oggenfuss said something final, and a shutter upstairs was closed. Then Frau Oggenfuss could be heard, her words impossible to make out but her tone urgent. After a pause the stairs creaked next door, although no individual footsteps could be heard, the sound made when someone wears slippers, the front door was opened, and Oggenfuss said in the suffering voice of someone forced to show politeness that he doesn’t feel: ‘So? Who are you? And what do you want?’

  The strange man had stopped coughing, but still said nothing. In the Meijers’ kitchen no one moved. When Salomon talked about it later, he said it was as if Joshua had made the moon stand still over the Valley of Ajalon. Chanele had taken a plate from the bowl; the dish-cloth had stopped in mid-air, and water dripped on the stone tiles. Mimi stared at a strand of hair that she had wrapped around her index finger, and Golde simply stood still, which was the most unusual thing of all, because Golde was otherwise always in motion.

  And then the stranger had found his voice and said something that everyone in the kitchen understood.

  He said a name.


  Salomon Meijer.

  Chanele, who never did such a thing, dropped the plate.

  Salomon leapt to his feet, ran to the front door, opened it so that two men now stood on the same little pedestal, three steps above the frost-glittering street, one in night-shirt and night-cap, a woollen blanket over his shoulders, a candle in his hand, the other, although without a frock coat, very correctly dressed. They stood almost side by side, for the two doors of the house were only an arm’s length apart. Oggenfuss made an exaggeratedly polite gesture which made the blanket slip from his shoulders, and said in a formal voice that contrasted strangely with his half-naked state: ‘It’s you the gentleman wants to see, Herr Meijer.’ Then he vanished into his half of the house and slammed the door behind him.

  The man in the street began to laugh, coughed and painfully doubled up. In the faint light that came from the house he could only be seen indistinctly, a slim figure apparently wearing a white fur cap.

  ‘Salomon Meijer?’ asked the stranger. ‘I’m Janki.’

  Only now did Salomon see that it was not a fur cap, but a bandage.

  2

  It was a thick, dirty white lint bandage, inexpertly wrapped around the man’s head, with a loose end that hung over the stranger’s shoulder like an oriental ribbon. Nebuchadnezzar out of the illustrated Bible stories wore a turban exactly the same shape, in the picture in which Daniel interprets his dream. Except that the Persian king’s turban was adorned with diamonds, not with blood. A couple of inches above his right eye a bright red spot had spread on the bandage, but if there was a fresh wound underneath it seemed to have stopped hurting. A few black curls peeped from under the edge of the white fabric. ‘A pirate,’ thought Mimi, because there had also been sea-robbers in the books that she secretly borrowed.

  The stranger’s face was narrow, his eyes big and his lashes noticeably long. His skin was tanned, like that of someone who works outside a great deal, which irritated Salomon; the winter had been so long, that now, with spring apparently so reluctant to come, even the peasants were pale. In his dark face, his teeth looked remarkably white.

  They had lots of time to look at him, they could study at their leisure his red and black uniform jacket, whose insignias did not match those of any troop known hereabouts, they were able to marvel at the Bohemian-looking double-knotted yellow silk kerchief that contrasted so defiantly with the rough material of the jacket; they were able to look at his narrow hands, the deft, mobile fingers, the nails, clean and neat in an unsoldierly fashion, and try to interpret what they saw as they might have interpreted an obscure verse of the Bible. Everyone seemed to be using a different commentary: Salomon saw the stranger as a scrounger, to be kept at arm’s length because he wanted something from you; Golde was reminded of the son who, had God so willed it, would have been the same age right now as this unexpected young guest; Mimi had moved on from pirates and decided he was an explorer, a global traveller who had seen everything and had much more still to see. Chanele was busy at the stove, and didn’t seem interested in the solution of this mystery that had dropped in out of nowhere; except the line of her eyebrows was higher on her face than usual.

  The visitor didn’t wait to be offered a chair, he chose a seat at the table, his back so close to the stove that Golde was worried he would burn himself. But no, he replied, if someone had been as cold as him, nothing could ever be too hot again.

  And then he ate. And how he ate!

  Even before the water was put on for his tea, he grabbed, without bothering to ask, the goyish berches, he tore fist-sized pieces from it with his unwashed hands, and without a word of blessing, and stuffed it into his mouth. He went on bolting it down even when Salomon told to him why the bread wasn’t kosher, he choked in his greed, he coughed and spat half-chewed chunks on the table. Even Mimi’s dove-grey housecoat got a spatter, which she rubbed away with her finger before, when everyone else was looking at the strange guest, sticking it quickly in her mouth.

  Nothing was left of the chopped eggs, the carp had disappeared, so had the herrings, and even the pot of Mother Feigele’s sauerkraut, which could have satisfied a big family for a week, was more than half empty. Eventually Golde looked questioningly at her husband, and he nodded resignedly and said, ‘Very well, then.’ Golde went into the little room in which the window behind the bars was always slightly open, brought in the package that she’d been keeping cool, then set it down on the table in front of the stranger and pulled open the cloth. And he, even though he had already eaten more than a whole minyan of pious men after a feast day, stared as ecstatically at Sarah’s cheesecake as the children of Israel once gazed upon the first manna in the desert.

  Then the cake too was devoured to the very last crumb. The man had set aside his cutlery, and instead clutched a steaming glass so firmly that it was easy to tell: he hadn’t yet warmed up. Chanele had prepared the special mixture that was known in this family as Techías Hameisim tea, because it was said to be able to raise the dead; candy sugar dissolved in a camomile brew with honey and cloves and a big shot of schnapps from Salomon’s private bottle. The stranger drank in great slugs. It was only when he had emptied a second glass that he began to tell his story.

  He spoke Yiddish, just as they all spoke Yiddish, not the supple, musical language of the East, but the ponderous, peasant form common in Alsace, the Great Duchy of Baden and of course here in Switzerland, too. The melody was slightly different – more elegant, Mimi thought – but they had no trouble understanding each other.

  ‘So I’m Janki,’ said the man, whose coughing seemed to have calmed down. ‘You will have heard of me.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ A cattle dealer never says ‘yes’ too quickly, and never too quickly ‘no’. Salomon knew lots of Jankis, but not one in particular.

  ‘I come from Paris. That is to say: I actually come from Guebwiller.’

  Salomon pushed back his chair, as he always did, without noticing it himself, when he started to become interested in a business deal. Paris was far away, but Guebwiller was a known quantity.

  ‘Did the son of your uncle Jossel marry into Guebwiller?’ Golde asked Salomon. ‘What was his name again?’

  To her surprise it was the strange man who answered her question. ‘Schmul,’ he said. ‘My father’s name was Schmul.’

  ‘Was,’ he had said, not ‘is’, so they all murmured their blessing for the Judge of Truth before they all started talking at once.

  ‘You are . . .?’

  ‘He is . . .?’

  ‘What uncle Jossel would that be?’

  An uncle, according to traditional Jewish practice, is not just the brother of the father or the mother. Even a much more distant relation can be an uncle; the tree is important, not the individual branch. Salomon hadn’t really known this uncle Jossel, he just thought he remembered a small, nimble man who had danced for so long at a chassene that the trumpeter’s lips had hurt. But at the time Salomon had been fifteen or sixteen, an age when one is interested in all kinds of things, just not strange relatives who come all the way to a wedding and then disappear again.

  ‘What uncle Jossel?’ Mimi asked again.

  ‘He was a son of Uncle Chaim, who you don’t know either,’ Salomon tried to explain, ‘and his father and my great-great grandfather were brothers.’ And he added after a pause, ‘I think. But am I Mother Feigele?’ Which was supposed to mean: if you want to know more, ask someone who has nothing more sensible to do than deal with family trees all day.

  ‘Mishpocha, then.’ Mimi sounded strangely disappointed.

  ‘But very distant mishpocha,’ said Janki and smiled at her.

  ‘He has lovely white teeth,’ she thought.

  ‘My father, Schmul Meijer,’ explained Janki, ‘actually came from Blotzheim—’

  ‘Exactly!’ said Salomon.

  ‘—and moved to Guebwiller, because my mother owned an inn there, which the peasants particularly liked to go to. In Guebwiller there’s a market every week. That is: th
e pub belonged to my grandfather, of course, but he wanted to be a scholar, and when his daughter married, he passed everything to the young couple. I only ever saw him in the pub room sitting over a big tome, at his table by the window. He murmured to himself as he studied, and when I was a little boy I thought he could do magic.’

  His voice became hoarse again, and Chanele quickly refilled his glass.

  ‘But he couldn’t do magic,’ said Janki, when he had drunk. ‘During the cholera epidemic of 1866 he wrote amulets and hung them above all the doors. Except that the disease probably couldn’t read his handwriting.’

  ‘He died,’ said Golde, and it wasn’t a question.

  ‘They all died.’ Janki stirred his finger in his glass and stared into it, as if nothing in the world could be more interesting than a whirlpool of boiled camomile blossoms. ‘In three days. Father. Mother. Grandfather. The old man held out the longest. Lay on his bed, his eyes wide open. Not blinking. He probably thought the angel of death could do nothing to him as long as he stared it in the face. But in the end he blinked.’ He paused and then added, still without looking up from his glass, ‘I can still smell their beds. Cholera doesn’t smell of roses.’ He shook a drop from his finger, as one does at Seder, when one gives away ten drops of the feast wine so as not to be too happy about the ten plagues of the Egyptians.

  ‘I could have a son his age,’ thought Golde. ‘And he could be an orphan already. Praised be the Judge of Truth.’

  ‘You have no brothers and sisters?’ she asked, and it was the first time anyone in the house had called him Du, not Ihr, as they would have addressed a stranger.

  ‘It isn’t easy to be the only one,’ Janki replied, and Mimi nodded, without noticing. ‘That is: it isn’t hard. One is responsible only for oneself, and that is fine.’