Trying to do something good for Janki, the three women jostled one another by his bed, elbow to elbow. With a damp cloth Chanele dabbed away the white crust that kept forming on his lips, like a baby bringing up sour milk. Golde tried to pour a slip of lukewarm tea between his lips, but it just ran down his chin to the collar of his shirt. The trail of fluid shimmered for a moment on his hot skin, and had then vanished again. Mimi had fetched a comb, her own comb, and cleared the hair from his damp forehead for the third time.
Then Janki suddenly began to speak.
It was more of a murmur, turned inwards, not outwards, he was saying something to himself to remind himself or to forget. They couldn’t make out the words, even though they were always the same few syllables, over and over and over.
‘He’s praying,’ said Golde, and forbade herself from thinking what prayer a man who was seriously ill might utter.
‘Perhaps he’s hungry,’ said Chanele.
‘Sha!’ said Mimi, and bent so low over the sick man that his smell, unsettlingly clean and slightly sour like bread dough, enveloped her as if she were caught in its embrace. Her ear was close to his mouth, but she didn’t feel his breath, just sensed the words, which were French but incomprehensible, and which made her pointlessly jealous, an alien conversation in which she was not involved. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said more loudly than necessary. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He is ill, and he needs peace and quiet, and, generally speaking, us treading on each other’s feet here won’t help him.’ And with those words she ran from the room, they heard her footsteps on the stairs, and the other two women, who had known Mimi for a lifetime, took a look to agree that she would now shut herself away in her room and there would be no sign of her for the next few hours.
‘Then I’ll go to Pomeranz,’ said Golde after a brief silence. Where Techías Hameisim tea did not help, she liked to deploy her most powerful weapon in the battle against illnesses of all kinds: a beef broth cooked so fiercely that a whole pound of meat produced only a single cup. Usually she would have sent Chanele to shochet Pomeranz to fetch the piece of stripped flank, but the short walk through the cold air would do her good, she thought, it would clear her head, foggy from the stuffy air. ‘You take care of things in the meantime,’ she said to Chanele, and was already outside the door.
Freed equally from Golde’s clucky concern and from Mimi’s impractical over-eagerness, Chanele first of all opened the hatch in the roof – even with a fever, she said to herself, you can’t freeze under a thick eiderdown – blew the candles out, then sat down by the bed with a bowl of vinegar water and methodically changed the cold compresses that were supposed to draw the fever to the feet and from there out of the body. Once, struggling with the stranger in his chest, Janki rolled over so violently that he threw the eiderdown to the floor. The skin on his legs was paler than that of his face, and his penis was long and thin.
The French words that he repeated so often, without being able to remember them later, were two lines from a song: about a drummer drumming the march and the ravens sitting in the trees and waiting.
In a village the night has many eyes and even more ears. Their night-time visit was already bound to have travelled around the community, and Golde knew that everyone she met would ask questions, some of them spoken out loud, but most, even more pressing, silent. So she didn’t go straight to the Marktgasse, but took a detour via the Mühleweg, along the Surb and past the mikvah, the bathing house, where she was unlikely to meet an acquaintance at this time of day. The little meadow where the river gently bends and where you can rub your washing clean so well would be deserted in the icy cold.
She walked quickly, on her short, always slightly waddling steps, a duck that’s being driven on with sticks but still can’t quite bring itself to fly. The wind swept particles of ice from the trees; they struck Golde’s face like fine needles, and she enjoyed the stinging pain because it ennobled the purchase of a pound of meat for soup into a mission full of self-sacrifice. Where the alleyways narrowed again and the houses with their curious windows waited for her, she pulled the black headscarf tighter around her head, and actually managed to reach Naftali Pomeranz’s shop without a single person talking to her.
Naftali wasn’t there. Only Pinchas, his son, of whom Pomeranz was so proud, looked after the shop, a lanky lad, as long and thin as his father, with a thin growth of beard and a big gap in his teeth in which, when he was embarrassed, his tongue played. He was standing at the window with a rag in one hand and a book in the other, had probably started cleaning it and then immersed himself once more in his reading. When Golde addressed him, he started wildly, dropped his book, just managed to catch it, had to bend down for the rag and said at last that his father had gone to shul, to the synagogue, to prepare the Torah scrolls for the Pesach service, and could she come back later, he wouldn’t be long.
‘No wonder he’s still single at twenty-five,’ thought Golde. No, she said severely, she couldn’t come back later, she had a sick guest at home who needed his strengthening soup, and as quickly as possible.
‘I’d like to fetch my father, I’d love to,’ said Pinchas and almost started stammering, ‘but he expressly ordered me to stay in the—’
‘Run!’
Sarah Pomeranz had come in, the woman whose cheesecake put Rothschild’s cook to shame. Even though she spent her life in the kitchen, she was just as gaunt as her husband and her son. It was almost part of her everyday outfit that her hands were covered with flour to the wrists, and she had to wipe them off on her apron before she was able to greet Golde properly. She closed the shop door behind Pinchas – ‘Who buys meat in the middle of the week?’ – and said in that way so characteristic of her: ‘You’ll have a coffee with me, no formalities, you give what you have.’ Golde, feeling slightly sick after all the excitement, was happy to accept the invitation, even though she knew that there was as much curiosity as hospitality involved. He who keeps secrets makes no friends.
While Sarah ran a handful of beans into the coffee mill and, to show how much she valued this visit, added another half-handful, Golde began to deliver her report. ‘He’s the same age as my son,’ she said, because sometimes, above all in events that violently stirred her emotions, she saw the child that hadn’t been allowed to live now standing before her as a grown-up man.
‘They say he’s a foreigner.’
‘A Frenchman, yes.’
‘And how did he come to you?’
‘He’s mishpocha of my husband.’
‘Ah, mishpocha,’ repeated Sarah, as if that explained everything, and explain everything it did. ‘And his name is?’
‘Janki. Janki Meijer.’
Sarah put the big dough bowl on the floor to make room on the table and straightened a table for Golde. ‘He wears a uniform, they say.’
‘He was a soldier.’
‘Wounded?’
‘No, nothing – Baruch Hashem! – happened to him.’
‘But he has a bandage. They say.’
‘He only has it . . . for security.’ There’s nothing, Golde noticed, that connects someone more closely with a person than a shared secret.
While her hostess turned the handle of the coffee mill, only with her fingertips as if that would make it quieter, Golde told her what she knew of Janki. As she did so she must have exaggerated slightly – when does one ever have the chance to tell such an adventurous tale? – because when the coffee was poured, a lot of coffee, not much water, as one does with honoured guests, Sarah sat down at her cup saying, ‘Just imagine . . . No older than my Pinchas, and already he’s survived Sedan!’ She made the sound of Jewish astonishment, a drawn-out hiss, the head moving back and forth so that the sound seems to ebb and flow.
‘He didn’t hear a single shot fired,’ Golde tried to correct her.
‘Not one? In such a big battle? Yes, God can protect a person wonderfully well.’ And because she always saw her husband’s shammes duties as her own, Sarah add
ed, ‘He will be summoned to the Torah and bentch gomel.’
Golde didn’t contradict her any further. There are stories that are stronger than reality. And besides, she liked the idea that Janki, whom she already called her Janki in her mind, should be a hero and in the end: marching his feet bloody and sharing a kennel with a farm dog – is that any less heroic than fighting in a battle? She was already looking forward to the moment when he, healed once more, might stand on the almemor in the synagogue and bentch gomel. Who had more reason than he to speak as a thanksgiver for dangers survived? They would look down at him from the women’s shul, and the other women would say, ‘Without Golde’s beef broth, heaven forfend, he wouldn’t have survived.’
They drank their coffee, black and with lots of sugar, and Sarah flushed with pride when Golde told her how much the God-protected Janki had liked her cheesecake, how not a single piece of it had been left, indeed, he had pushed the crumbs together and licked them from the palm of his hand. ‘He’ll fit in well with us here in the village,’ Sarah said out of deep conviction, and Golde heard herself expressing, to her own surprise, something that she had not yet even really thought: ‘Yes, he will stay here. We will take him in. He has no one else, after all.’
Then Naftali Pomeranz came in and would have loved to hear all the news, but was sent to the shop to cut the meat. Sarah insisted – ‘That’s the least we can do!’ – that Golde didn’t take the little parcel home herself, but that Pinchas went with her. After all, doing something for a sick person was a God-pleasing deed, a mitzvah, and it would be a pleasure for her son, ‘isn’t that right, Pinchasle?’
Pinchas took such long strides that Golde almost had to scuttle her short legs to keep up with him. Out of pure politeness she tried to talk to the young man once or twice, and praised him for promising to be, as one heard, a worthy successor to his father, but couldn’t entice a sensible word from him. It was only when they were standing at the door of the double-fronted house and he handed her the parcel that he suddenly blurted, ‘Abraham Singer comes to see you often, doesn’t he?’ then turned and ran away without waiting for an answer.
‘Strange,’ thought Golde. ‘Why would he care whether the marriage broker had called on Mimi?’
While the beef broth was still cooking – perhaps the smell alone, drifting through the house, would have an effect – Janki fell asleep. His breath, although it still had a quiet, papery rustle, was so calm, and his forehead was so much cooler, that Chanele dried his feet, covered them up and crept from the room on tiptoe.
Janki was quite alone now. Uncle Melnitz sat on the empty chair by his bed and talked to him.
‘You’re asleep,’ said Melnitz. ‘You think nothing can happen to you when you’re here. But that’s not true. Here is no different from anywhere else. Nowhere is different.
‘Ten years ago was the last time it happened. Here in Endingen, yes. We were to get a few more rights. Not rights like the Christians, but almost like human beings. And they smashed in our windows. Not only the windows. Sometimes one of those stones lands on your head. Little Pnina had only herself to blame. She should have run away faster. Or made herself invisible. They would like us much better if we were invisible, yes.
‘There are no guilty parties, because no one was there. No one anyone knew. They’d discussed that. They’d also agreed that everything would happen unprepared. From the people. From the moment.’
Uncle Melnitz had closed his eyes like someone only repeating a lesson learned long ago to be sure that he hasn’t forgotten it.
‘And at the start of the century we had the plum war here in Endingen, that’s right. A little war. We live in a small country. The French had occupied Switzerland at the time. Napoleon. But they didn’t wage war against him. He wouldn’t have been afraid of their sticks. They fought against us. That’s simpler. They had taught us not to defend ourselves long ago.
‘They called it the plum war because the ripe plums were hanging from the trees. They like to wait until the harvest is over. Before, you have so much else to do. Afterwards you need something to do with your strength.
‘There was another name for it. The ribbon war. Because they stole the bright ribbons from the dealers they beat up. They took other things too, but you saw the ribbons afterwards. Fastened to jackets. To sleeves. To hats. As medals, that’s right. To show that they’d been there. Pride. Afterwards they always had only two possibilities. To be proud or be ashamed. They preferred to be proud.
‘Someone from the village, a head of the community – his name was Guggenheim, like the inn – tried to talk to them. That was a mistake. If you talk, you’re a human being, and they didn’t want us to be human beings. Because you don’t stick your pitchfork in a human being’s face, so that a prong goes in one cheek and out the other. Because you don’t laugh at a human being when he tries to talk and can’t because his tongue is torn. Because you don’t hit a human being on the back of the head with a threshing flail just to make them stop screaming.
‘Plum war, that’s right. They called it war because the word made heroes of them. They’re always heroes, every time they lay into us.’
Janki had closed his eyes. The blanket over his chest rose and sank only slightly, a ship that had reached the harbour and still remembered the waves from a distance. One hand lay beside his head, palm upwards, as if he were waiting for a present.
‘You think you’re safe now,’ said Melnitz. ‘But there is no safety. When he was lying on the floor and had stopped moving, one of them put his boot on his head. One that the girls liked because even after a bottle of wine he didn’t touch them against their will. One who liked to play tunes on a comb with a sheet of paper folded over it. One who quickly picked dandelions for the rabbit whose neck he was going to break. A nice person.
‘He put his boot on his head and pressed his face in the dirt because he wouldn’t have been able to pull out the pitchfork otherwise. Tools are expensive, and the fork didn’t belong to him. If he had been alone, he would have apologised as he did it. He was a decent person, yes. But he wasn’t alone. They are never alone.
‘There is no safety,’ said Melnitz and told another story and another. He spoke without haste, someone who has a lot of time to fill. The way one speaks the Shemoneh Esrei at solemn festivals, one interpolation and then another. ‘Sometimes they shout,’ he said, ‘and sometimes they whisper. Sometimes they are silent for a long time, and you think they’ve forgotten us. But they don’t forget us. Believe me, Janki. They don’t forget us.’
The smell of beef broth now filled the whole house the way incense, they say, fills a church.
4
‘Horses?’
Salomon had been reluctant to take Janki along with him. First of all, people who have just been sick belong at home, and second . . . He hadn’t been able to say the second to Golde. His wife had taken this relative, this unexpected visitor, as unreservedly to her heart as, many years ago, Mimi had the kitten that a farm hand had wanted to drown and which, facing perils that grew with every repetition of the story, she had rescued from the Surb River. Then as now, arguments would have served no useful purpose, and Golde would certainly not have accepted the actual reason for his rejection: Salomon didn’t trust Janki. It was only a feeling, a grumbling in his belly, but Salomon had avoided many a bad deal because he had believed his belly more than his head.
So in the end he had given in, not because of Janki’s pleading eyes, even though they had seemed as big in that sunken face as the eyes of a pregnant cow, but just to have some peace. He had even lent him a coat, his own old coat, which he always wore when he knew he would be spending the whole day in byres, and had been annoyed – ‘Nu, it’s going to smell of violet water!’ – over the fact that Janki screwed up his nose and tested the heavy fabric as contemptuously between his fingers as a grain-dealer pulverising a dead ear of corn. He had lent him, no, given him, boots as well; why put off acts of generosity that you can’t avoid anyway? ‘It’s
nice’, Golde had said, ‘that he’s so interested in your business. Who knows, perhaps it’s something for him later on?’ And Salomon, true to the principle that it’s usually a good idea to hold your tongue, hadn’t replied, ‘A tailor as a beheimes dealer? Is he going to measure up riding trousers for the cows?’
So now they walked along side by side. Salomon’s umbrella left its trail of holes, and Janki’s boots, always a few steps behind, tramped them closed again. It was the first warm day this year; the spring dripped freshly thawed from the trees, on which the birds practised twittering as eagerly as if their beaks had been frozen shut throughout all those months. There was not a trace of romanticism in Salomon Meijer, he didn’t even know the word, and yet today he would have preferred them to have walked in silence through the splashy morning.
But Janki talked. Still weakened by fever, he struggled to keep up, and talked. He stopped to catch his breath, ran a few steps behind, which left him even more short of breath, and talked. Salomon wasn’t walking any faster than usual, but he wasn’t walking more slowly either. He was on his way to meet master butcher Gubser in the byre that he had rented from the lea-farmer, and he would arrive on time for his appointment as he always did. Did Janki absolutely insist on coming? Nu, let him. If he wanted to waste his meagre strength chatting, instead of saving it for walking, then let him.
On the evening of his arrival, Janki had talked like a little boy coming home after his first day in cheder, and who has to get off his chest all the fears he endured from his strange new teacher. Now his breathless flow of chat had something of a quack doctor praising his home-made medicine in the marketplace, good against headaches, toothache and women’s complaints, promising guaranteed healing as long as the patient was willing to swallow the brew for three weeks, every day at the same time – probably aware that he himself would be standing far away in a different market in three weeks, and that all promises are forgotten in a year or even in only six months.
Melnitz Page 4
