Mimi was still nodding.
‘Everyone expected me to go on running the pub. I wasn’t yet twenty, and I was to spend my whole life pouring schnapps, washing glasses, cleaning tables and laughing at the stories of the drunk peasants. I didn’t want that. But on the other hand: that was what my parents had left me. If it was good enough for them – who was I to want something else?’
‘So you made up your mind?’
Janki shook his head. ‘It was taken away from me. People stopped coming to the inn. Too many people had died in the house, and the suspicious peasants no longer found it quite heimish. I got a decent price for it, not very good, not very bad, and with that I went to Paris.’
‘Why Paris?’ asked Chanele, who had listened in silence until that moment.
‘Do you know a better city?’ he asked back, folded his hands behind his head and leaned far back. ‘Does anyone know a better city?’
It was a question that no one in this kitchen could answer.
‘I wanted to get away from Guebwiller. I wanted to be something that would mean I never had to go back there. Something special, something strange.’
Explorer, thought Mimi. Pirate.
‘I wanted to go where the masters are. Just as some people go to Lithuania or Poland because a rabbi that they want to emulate teaches there. Except I wasn’t looking for a rabbi.’
‘But?’
‘A tailor.’
If Janki had said ‘a knacker’ or ‘a gravedigger’, the disappointment around the table could not have been greater. A tailor was more or less the most ordinary thing they could think of, there were tailors on every street-corner, a tailor was neighbour Oggenfuss, a lanky, short-sighted man who sat on his table all day and was bossed around by his wife. A tailor? And that was why he had gone to Paris?
Janki laughed when he saw their baffled faces, he laughed so hard that his coughing started up again and his face contorted. He held the end of his bandage in front of his mouth like a handkerchief and gesticulated for more tea with his other hand. When the attack had settled down again, he went on speaking in a very quiet, careful voice, like someone setting a sprained foot hesitantly on the ground.
‘I ask your forgiveness. It’s the cold. And the hunger. But at least I’m still alive. That is: I’ve even been living very well since I’ve been here. What was I going to say?’
‘A tailor,’ said Mimi, holding the word between pointed fingers.
‘Of course. A tailor in Paris, you must know, is not simply someone who stitches a pair of trousers together always using the same cut, or, when making a skirt, considers how much fabric he can have left over. Of course, there are such tailors, and there are many of them. But the ones I mean, the real ones, are something quite different. It’s like . . . like . . .’ He looked around the kitchen in search of a suitable comparison. ‘Like a sunrise compared with this oil lamp. These men are famous artists, you understand. Great gentlemen. They don’t bow to their customers. They never pick up a needle themselves. They have other people to do that.’
‘A tailor is a tailor,’ said Salomon.
‘Perhaps in the village. But in a proper city. Not,’ he made his voice higher, as one does in the minyan, when after the naming of the divine names everyone is supposed to reply with a blessing, ‘not if one is called François Delormes.’
No one in the house had ever heard of François Delormes.
‘I have worked for him. He was the best, a prince among tailors. Someone who could even afford to say no to the emperor.’
‘Well,’ said Salomon, who was used to being suspicious if someone over-praised a deal to him, ‘it can hardly have been the emperor.’
‘It was his valet. The personal valet of Napoleon the Third. He came to Monsieur Delormes and ordered a tailcoat. For the emperor. A midnight blue tailcoat with silver embroidery. Says Delormes: “No.” “Why not?” inquires the valet. And Delormes replies: “Blue doesn’t suit him.” Isn’t that wonderful?’
‘It can’t have happened.’
‘I was there. I have held in my own hand the swatch of fabric chosen by the valet.’
‘Midnight blue,’ said Mimi quietly. It sounded even more elegant than ‘dove grey’.
‘So you’re a tailor?’ Chanele, who had been standing the whole time, now sat down at the table with the others. ‘What sort of tailor?’
‘None at all,’ said Janki. ‘I soon realised that I’m not cut out for it. I may have the skill, but not the patience. I am not a patient man. All day one stitch and another stitch and another stitch, and all exactly the same length – it’s not for me. No, I worked in the fabric store. I was there when the customers came. Showed them the patterns. The bolts of material. We had a selection . . . There was shantung silk in more than thirty different colours.’
‘Shantung silk,’ Mimi thought, and knew that she would never like another fabric more for the rest of her life.
‘I learned a lot,’ said Janki. ‘About materials. About fashion. Above all about the people who can afford both. And they began to get to know me too. I started to become someone. Somebody advised me to set up on my own. Wanted to lend me money. In the end I rented a little shop with a little flat. And then I made my mistake.’
‘Mistake?’ asked Golde, startled.
‘I came back to Guebwiller to collect the few pieces of furniture that I’d left with a drayman. They were glad when I arrived. They gave me a cordial welcome. Took me in their arms and wouldn’t let me go, those swine!’ He had been speaking in muted tones, but he shouted those last words so loudly and with such fury that Golde looked fearfully at the wall, behind which the Oggenfuss family must have long been asleep.
‘“How nice that you’re here,” they said.’ Janki’s voice had become quieter and quieter, but there was something in it that made Mimi think, with a pleasantly creepy shudder: ‘If he had to kill somebody, he would poison them.’
‘“We’ve been waiting for you,” they said. “You’re on the list,” they said. They’d had enough time to manipulate them. There’d been nobody there to take my side, to bribe the right man at the right time. I was on the list, and there was nothing to be done about the list. And so, rather than opening a shop in Paris, I was marched to Colmar along with two dozen others, and became a soldier. Twentieth Corps. Second Division. Fourth Battalion of the Régiment du Haut-Rhin.’
There are wines that you have to drink quickly once the barrel has been tapped, otherwise they go sour. As long as the bunghole is firmly closed, they keep for years, but once they’ve been opened . . . Janki’s story came bubbling out of him, and like a badly kept wine there were some things floating around in them that might have spoiled one’s thirst or curiosity.
He talked about his training, ‘The same thing a thousand times, as if you were a fool, an idiot, or were to be made into a fool’, about the marching that his fine city boots hadn’t endured for long, ‘If you wrap rags around your feet, you have to soak them in urine first, it’s good for the blisters,’ about the officers’ horses, which were treated better than the young recruits, ‘because horses kick’. He talked about what it feels like when you’re crammed together with people you have nothing in common with, how you have to smell and taste and put up with them, how you have to listen to their jokes, in which you yourself come up as a caricature again and again, ‘Their second favourite subject was food and their third favourite the Jews.’
But even when he was talking about things so revolting that Mimi had to shake herself like someone who’s had her throat burned by rough brandy, but who knows already that the next slug will taste better and the one after that better still, even if he was describing experiences that made Golde involuntarily stretch out her hand, as if she had to pull him away and bring him to safety, indeed, even when he suggested experiences that cannot be avoided when young men live in such close proximity – Chanele raised her eyebrows and Salomon uttered a warning ‘Now, then!’ – even then his story had an undertone of lon
ging, a memory of times that might not have been good but were better than the ones that came after. And they all knew what had come after. Even in Endingen, where the waves of world history lapped only wearily at the shore, they knew about the war, they had heard of the imprisonment and deposition of the Emperor, of the big battle on the first of September in which a hundred thousand Frenchmen had fallen – and Janki had perhaps been there, had experienced the horrors of that day and had now, by some miracle, a real nes min hashamayim, got away.
‘No,’ said Janki and made a sound that might have been a laugh, a cough or a sob, it was impossible to tell, ‘I wasn’t in Sedan. We new recruits didn’t make it that far. They did make us swear oaths. To the Emperor. Or to the fatherland. To something or other. I don’t remember. An ancient colonel spoke the oath for us. One of the ones who have to hollow their backs so that their medals didn’t topple them over. With a high, squeaking voice. And then, standing in rank and file, we couldn’t make out what he said. So I swore something and have no idea what it was.’ This time it was unambiguously a laugh, but not a pleasant one. ‘If we were engaged in a cattle-trade,’ thought Salomon, ‘I wouldn’t buy now.’
‘I don’t know what I would have done in a battle,’ said Janki. ‘I would probably have tried to run away.’
‘No,’ thought Mimi. ‘You wouldn’t have done that.’
‘But it didn’t come to that. All we did was march. I never found out whether we were marching away from the Germans or towards them. Marching, marching, marching. Once for fifteen hours straight, and in the end we were back in the same village we’d started from. Six hours there and nine hours back. Without food and water. We weren’t marching at the end, we were creeping on two legs. But I never saw an enemy soldier. They had no time for us. They were too busy winning the war. When the old colonel with the bird voice, the oberbalmeragges from the oath-swearing, told us it was all over, we lay on the floor like dead flies, too exhausted to get up and listen. And he used such beautiful patriotic words. If we’d believed him, the capitulation was a triumph. Why not? What was the point of being in a war if you can’t be a hero afterwards? I’ll tell my children I fought like a lion.’
They were all polite and didn’t ask the question. But even evasive eyes can pierce like needles. Chanele rubbed a dry plate still drier, Golde sucked her lower lip, and Salomon was earnestly preoccupied with a renegade strand in his sideburns. Only Mimi started to say, ‘Where did . . .?’ but stopped mid-phrase and ran her hand over her brow, at the exact position of the bloodstain on Janki’s dirty white turban.
‘The bandage?’ he asked. ‘Oh, yes, the bandage.’
He stretched his arm out in an elegantly demanding gesture, a young prince in one of Mimi’s novels, inviting a pretty kitchen-maid to dance. ‘If you would care to help me, Mademoiselle?’ he said to Chanele.
He untied the knot himself, but then she was the one who unrolled the bandage, slowly and carefully, as one unwinds the strips of cloth around the scrolls of the Holy Scripture. It was so quiet in the kitchen that everyone gave a start when the first coin fell to the floor.
Only Janki didn’t move. ‘Thieving is rife among one’s dear comrades,’ he said. ‘One has to come up with a good hiding place for one’s small fortune.’
‘He’s a pirate,’ thought Mimi.
‘He’s a ganev,’ thought Salomon.
There was another clatter on the stone tiles, then Chanele was ready and collected the coins from the bandage as soon a they appeared. What lay neatly aligned on the table at last, in silver and twice even in gold, was a minted picture book of French history, Louis XV, a fat baby, Louis XVI, a fat grown-up, the winged genius of the Revolution, Napoleon as a Greek bust, Louis XVIII with his pigtails, Louis-Philippe with his laurel wreath and Napoleon III with his tufted beard.
‘The blood on the bandage was real,’ said Janki. ‘But luckily it wasn’t mine.’
And then, now apparently as wide awake as he had been exhausted when he arrived, he told them how they had marched off again after the armistice, marched, marched, marched, about how no one had known where they were going because none of their superiors had told them anything – ‘They keep you stupid, because otherwise no one would stay a soldier’ – about how the rumour had gradually spread that their general, who hadn’t been able to win the war, now wanted at least to win the defeat, that it was no longer a matter of beating the Germans but just not falling into their hands, how they had finally, completely exhausted, crossed the border and, with ludicrous pride, fallen in step once more on the snow-covered road with the soldiers of the Swiss Confederation – ‘Basically they were a pathetic shower, and we were a whole army’ – how they had bundled their rifles into clean pyramids, always eight and then eight again, how the officers had been allowed to keep their swords, of course, how the senior gentlemen had behaved correctly and even genially towards one another, regardless of whether they were interning or internees – ‘When they aren’t actually shooting at each other, they’re a big mishpocha. His eyes turned moist as he described what their first soup had tasted like, how it had been ladled from the big pot, boiling hot, but how no one wanted to wait, not for so much as a minute, how they had burned their mouths and been happy none the less, and how a Swiss soldier – ‘He wore a uniform, but he spoke like a civilian’ – had apologised to them, actually apologised for not having anything better to offer than a pile of straw on the floor of a barn – ‘As if we would otherwise have been sleeping on a downy bed, with silk nightcaps’ – how they had at last had time to rest in the camp, how they had slept, just slept, for a night and a day and another night. He was talking faster and faster, the way you get faster and faster during the last prayer on the Day of Atonement because the time of fasting is over and food is waiting, he described how the camp had not been a camp at all, just a village, a snowed-in peasant village in the Alb, where the guards were just as bored as those they guarded, and how they started to talk to each other, how useful his Yiddish was to him, how he had befriended a soldier from Muri who wanted to try out his stumbling French on him, and he copied the man, jumping about like a badchen entertaining the guests at a wedding, and he demonstrated how he had copied him word for word without having even the faintest understanding of the meaning – ‘Dancing a minuet in wooden clogs’ – he made them laugh and yet felt troubled by their laughter, didn’t want to be interrupted, just as he hadn’t tolerated interruption over dinner, and he uttered his tale like a prayer whose every section had been repeated a thousand times: how the soldier demanded three Louis d’Or from him, but had then been negotiated down to only one, how he even wrote down the journey, from large town to large town, how simple it had been to walk out among the patrols, either because they didn’t expect escape attempts or because they didn’t care – ‘One more, one less, what did it matter?’ – and he told them how he had marched, marched, marched, marched, only by night at first, but soon by day as well, how he had slept in haystacks and once in a kennel, pressed up against the farm dog, which shivered just as much as he did, and he told them how he had begged, unsuccessfully, from suspicious farmers who begrudged him so much as a word of greeting, how once, at the market in Solothurn, he had stolen a brown cake filled with almond paste, the best, best, best that he had ever tasted in his life, how ‘Endingen’ had become a magic word for him, all those endless days, how he had given himself courage, how he had cried, just with happiness, when someone told him, just one more town, then he’d be there, how he’d felt as if the tears were freezing on his face, how he had arrived at last, chilled to the bone and almost starving, and then a goy had opened the door to him and yelled at him, and how he was there now and wanted to stay there, with his relatives, for ever.
‘For ever?’ Salomon thought.
‘For ever,’ thought Mimi.
3
Next morning Janki had a high fever.
His cold, only temporarily concealed by the excitements of the previous evening, had returned i
nvigorated, if it was indeed only a cold and not, heaven forfend, bronchitis or worse. Salomon had set off for Degermoos early in the morning, without seeing his guest again, and so it was left to the three women to tend to the patient.
They had set up a bed for him in the attic room, and there he lay now, his whole body boiling hot and still shivering with cold. His vacant eyes were open wide, but if you moved your hand in front of them, the pupils didn’t follow the movement. Every now and again a dry cough shook Janki’s body, as if an unknown person were hammering his chest from within. His lips trembled, like a premature baby that wanted to cry but didn’t yet have the strength, or an old man who had already used up all the tears that life had assigned him.
The room was dark and sticky. Up here, where only a shnorrer would ever have spent the night, there was no real window, just a hatch that could be opened a crack to let in a little light and air. But outside it was icy cold and frozen, one of those jangling late winter days when every breath cuts your throat, and Golde said Janki had – me neshuma! – had enough. So the hatch remained closed, and lest the patient be left entirely in the dark, they had had to light some flickering candles that almost went out every time someone’s skirt stirred in the cramped room. Practical Chanele suggested putting the candles in jars, but Mimi emphatically resisted the idea, and when Chanele asked for a sensible reason, Mimi wiped tears from her eyes and refused to answer. The inexpressible reason, and Golde felt this exactly as her daughter did, was of course that such candles would have looked like the commemorative ones set up on the day of a relative’s death.
Among the candles on the old bedside table – one leg was missing, and they had had to put a plank of wood underneath it – framed by the flickering wicks, lay Janki’s yellow neckerchief, in which Golde had tied his coins, all the kings, emperors and revolutionary spirits. She avoided looking there, because when she held the heavy lump in her hand, a thought of which she was still ashamed had passed through her mind. ‘Enough for a levaya,’ she had thought, ‘enough money for a funeral.’
Melnitz Page 3
