‘Horses? What would I want with horses? Cows are my trade.’
‘Yes,’ said Janki, ‘I understood that, but you have to try out new things too.’
‘Why?’
‘To get on. Monsieur Delormes was forever designing new cuts. Wide lapels. Narrow lapels. None at all.’
‘“None at all” is the one I like. Because cows don’t wear coats.’ He had had to keep his jokes to himself with Golde. But it wasn’t Salomon Meijer’s style to waste things.
‘It would be a good time for horses.’
‘Do you know that as a soldier or as a tailor?’
‘I know it from the man from Muri. The man I spent a long time talking French to.’
‘A horse trader?’
‘He was a teacher.’
‘At a school for horses?’
Salomon couldn’t afford to be ironic with his farmers. He found the argument all the more amusing now for that very reason. He even complacently swung his umbrella once around his hand, as smitten farmworkers did with their walking sticks on Sunday.
‘He told me something,’ said Janki. ‘It was secret, but he told me because he was proud that he knew all the words for it. Almost all the words, that is.’
‘Well?’
Janki, apparently interested only in the cleanliness of his new old boots, carefully stepped around a puddle. Anyone else wouldn’t even have noticed that he was only trying to hide his last hesitation before making a decision, but anyone who has engaged in lots of cattle deals learns to read such signs.
‘Well?’ Salomon asked again.
Janki coughed, although there was no coughing left in him. Then he stopped. ‘We can get involved in the business together.’
‘I should have walked on,’ Salomon said to himself later. ‘Just walked on and stopped listening to him. Then everything might have turned out differently.’
But he didn’t walk on. He stopped as well and asked, ‘What kind of business?’
‘Horses,’ said Janki, and now had a smile on his face that Salomon disliked as much as Mimi would have liked it. ‘We will sell horses that we don’t have.’
The business that Janki suggested when they stood facing one another among the dripping fruit trees, and which he over-eagerly explained as they walked along again, side by side, more slowly than before, which he praised with hucksterish eloquence, when they stopped again, gesticulating, having reached their destination far too quickly, this business went like this:
The French officers – ‘whose boots we had to clean, even though they barely ever set foot on the floor’ – all the lieutenants, capitaines and colonels, had not marched into their internment, but proudly ridden over the border, with freshly greased harnesses, had tugged the reins of their horses, which were fed significantly better than the infantrymen who dragged themselves wearily along, between the rows of Swiss soldiers, making them dance and traverse, in order to say: ‘We have not come here as defeated men, we still have strength in abundance, and if we’d wanted things to be different, we would have done things differently.’
They had then – ‘And like idiots we put up with it, at least on the first day’ – taken all the steaming hay-bales that the exhausted soldiers had torn apart to make a comfortable camp for themselves, and requisitioned them for themselves, straw for the troops, hay for the horses, and had even ridden out in the first few weeks, had straightened their backs and held their reins loosely between two gloved fingers, but then the hay had started running out, not to mention the oats, and at last the horses had only stood there, in stables where that was possible, but also just under the open sky, tied in long rows; attempts had been made to light big fires to warm them a little, but the smoke had only made them restless and bad-tempered.
‘There are some lovely animals among them,’ said Janki, ‘particularly the officers’ private horses, but most of them are of course luggage pullers, dray and coach horses, and you’re not going to win a show-jumping competition with those, but you might be able to drag a cannon out of the dirt. Hundreds of horses. Fodder for butchers.’
‘Well?’ said Salomon, and packed into that one syllable was a whole droosh, a sermon interpreting the verse of the scripture: ‘You shouldn’t tell a beheimes dealer, who’s only interested in cows, anything about horses.’
‘Now comes the bit that no one knows yet,’ said Janki and took Salomon by the sleeve, an intimacy that not even Golde allowed herself. ‘It’s to be a secret for as long as possible, so that no one does a private deal with it. But this schoolmaster disguised as a soldier gave the game away to me. They decided to sell all the French horses to pay for part of the expense of the detention. There’s going to be a big auction, in Saignelégier.’
‘So?’
Janki stared at Salomon, amazed and sympathetic, the way you might look at someone who’s been asked a riddle and is still looking for the solution even though it’s staring him right in the face. ‘“So?” you ask? There will be so many horses on the market that prices in Switzerland are bound to collapse. They’ll be so eager that they’ll carry the animals to our door, as long as we buy them.’
‘We won’t buy them.’
‘Yes, we will. After we’ve sold them.’
And then he described his plan to Salomon again, the plan he had hatched in the internment camp, he Janki Meijer, all by himself, the only thinking person amongst defeated, apathetic time-servers, the plan that had given him strength on his long march through Switzerland, that had warmed him in a stinking kennel, that had drawn him from his fever as if on a rope, because there was no time to lose, not a single day, because the opportunity was there now and it wouldn’t come back.
They would sell horsemeat to a butcher, ideally to master butcher Gubser, with whom Salomon would have made an agreement to sell horsemeat, on contract, due in one month, one hundred kilos, two hundred, five hundred, what did Janki know, as much as Gubser would take from them, they would offer him a price so cheap that he would think they’d gone meshuga, a metsiya that no one could resist, certainly not a goyish butcher, because, as Janki remembered from the pub in Guebwiller they were always prepared to pull a fast one. But when the contract came due and the meat had to be supplied, the prices for horses would have dropped to their lowest ever, the butcher would be furious – ‘But is that our problem?’ – and they would make a reyvech, enough to set up as a tailor or a cloth-dealer or whatever you liked. Janki was so sure of his argument that he dared to parody the cattle-trader, whose support he after all relied on, with comical distortions.
‘So?’ asked Janki.
Salomon Meijer stroked his sideburn. ‘A good sign,’ thought Janki, who didn’t know him. Salomon looked thoughtfully down the hill, at the stable less than two hundred yards away, where they were already waiting for him, then he rammed his umbrella into the soft soil, so that it seemed to stand all by itself, Moses’ rod before the Pharaoh. He leaned against a tree, as Rav Bodenheimer sometimes leaned against the bookshelf when he began to explain something in a lesson, and said, ‘Look at this umbrella!’
‘The umbrella?’
‘I always keep it with me, and I never put it up. Why?’
Janki helplessly spread his arms. He had no idea what Salomon was getting at.
‘It’s a mark. Something striking. Something that distinguishes me from all other Jews who deal with beheimes. Just as the pot in which I cook something in the inn when I have to stay there overnight, differs from all other pots. Because I make a mark on it. Three letters, a kaf, a shin and a resh, inside on the bottom. The word “kosher”. If the letters are still there next time I know: I can use the pot. You understand?’
Janki didn’t understand at all. How did they get from the horses to an umbrella and from the umbrella to a pot?
Salomon wouldn’t be hurried. He finished his thoughts as slowly and carefully as the Rav did when he put two distant quotations together to clarify a disputed passage. ‘I have assumed the habit of the umbrella so that
people know who I am. The Jew with the brolly. The way you brand a mark on a horse’s rump, if you want to talk about horses. It’s been stolen from me twice, because there’s a rumour among the farm boys that it’s the place,’ and he pointed to the belly of the umbrella, where the black fabric swelled in the gentle spring breeze, ‘in which I keep my money. Nu, let them steal it. What does such an umbrella cost? I have three more like it at home.’ When Salomon laughed he kept his lips closed, and his cheeks with their little red veins went round like two apple halves.
‘I’m the Jew with the brolly. And people know: this Jew is honest. This Jew doesn’t cheat. We can rely on the Jew. Not that I give them presents. Then they would say: the Jew is stupid. If they leave a cow that I’m supposed to buy unmilked in the byre for two days, so that the udder looks firmer, then I laugh at them. But it must be exactly the same the other way around. If they come to the Jew with the brolly for the milk cow and want to check the rings on the horn to see how often she has calved before, the horns aren’t filed down. A beef bullock that someone buys from me won’t have thirsted at the salt lick and then greedily drunk its fill of water, so that it weighs a few pounds more on the scales. People know that, and that’s why they do their deals with me and not with anyone else. That’s how I live, that’s my parnooseh. And because that’s the case, and because that’s how it’s going to stay . . .’
‘But it’s a unique opportunity,’ Janki said pleadingly, knowing that he had lost the argument.
‘Because it’s how it’s to stay,’ Salomon went on, ‘I will not sell butcher Gubser horsemeat on a contract that will only mean he loses money. Have I made a name for myself for all these years, only to buy it from me for a few gold pieces and then throw it away?’ He pulled the tip of the umbrella out of the muddy ground with a quiet thwock and then went down the hill towards the byre, sticking the umbrella into the ground with every second step, as if to mark a boundary line.
There was something of the parson about master butcher Gubser, an unctuous tone that made him popular with the housewives who bought from his shop. He had the habit of repeating words that he didn’t mean two or three times, putting his fleshy red hand on his heart as if making an oath before a court.
‘Ah, the new relation,’ he said, and half-bowed to Janki. ‘I’ve heard of him. Welcome, welcome, welcome. A cattle trader too?’
‘A businessman too,’ replied Janki, and Salomon inflated his cheeks with his lips closed.
‘From France, I hear. Been at the Battle of Sedan. Must have been terrible. Terrible.’
‘There are nicer places to be than battlefields,’ said Janki, and Gubser laughed as loudly and heartily as if he had never heard a more polished bon mot.
‘Brilliant,’ he said, ‘brilliant, brilliant. But then you Jews have a way with words. That’s why one has to take such care when one’s doing business with you. But Herr Meijer knows I’m not blaming you. Everyone’s as God has made him. A calf isn’t a sheep, and a pig isn’t a goat.’
Salomon, resting his hands on the handle of his umbrella, seemed to be counting the empty swallows’ nests under the roof truss of the byre.
‘Today I need a cow,’ said Gubser. ‘A cheap cow with a lot of meat on its bones. Could even be old and tough. Sausages are sausages, whatever you put in them.’ He laughed loud and long, and when Janki didn’t join in with his laughter, he asked, ‘Didn’t he understand that, this Frenchman of yours?’
‘Doesn’t he understand me, or doesn’t he want to understand me?’ Salomon said to Golde a weeks later. ‘I ask him how he imagines his future, and he just looks at me and shrugs his shoulders and goes for a walk.’
‘He needs to recover. He has been ill, and has to do something for his health.’ Golde’s voice sounded muted, because her head was in the big cupboard in the bedroom, as if in a cave. Crouching on the floor, she was fishing from the very back corner all the things that you never throw away, and only ever pick up at the Pesach cleaning. She held out to her husband a shard of painted porcelain, part of the plate that had been broken and distributed almost twenty-five years ago on the day of their engagement, and they exchanged a smile as one can only smile after long years of marriage, assembled from equal parts of contented memory and almost-as-contented resignation.
‘Still,’ said Salomon. He helped Golde to her feet and tried not to remember how much lighter in body and soul she once had been. ‘He runs around the place, you never know where he’s going next, and if you want to exchange a word with him he doesn’t listen.’
‘He’s young,’ said Golde. ‘And he’s disappointed, it seems to me. What sort of business deal did he suggest to you?’
‘Not a clean one.’ Business deals were men’s affair. Salomon didn’t ask Golde why all the handleless cups and cracked glasses had to be cleaned so thoroughly once a year, only to gather dust again for twelve months in the bottom drawer. ‘I couldn’t go along with it. But that’s no reason to go walking around the world all on your own. People are talking.’
Golde filled her apron with cutlery, a peasant woman collecting pears in the autumn. She chewed on her lower lip, firmly resolved not to tell her husband, who always thought he knew everything and yet didn’t understand a thing, a word of what people were really saying. But then, already half way out of the room, he was stronger than she was. She turned around again and said, ‘He’s not always alone.’
‘My real name is Miriam,’ Mimi had said. ‘They call me Mimi because they treat me like a child. But I’m not a child any more.’
‘No,’ Janki had replied, ‘you’re not a child any more.’ And he had looked at her with a look, ‘with a look’, Mimi had told the schoolmaster’s daughter the same day, ‘that would make you blush if he wasn’t a relative.’
The friendship between the two young women went back to their childhood days. They had splashed together in the shallow water when they were still too little to understand that while they might have belonged to the same village they actually lived in different worlds. Anne-Kathrin had also played an important part in the episode with the rescued kitten; she had brought along the long-handled net that her father always took fishing, in the hope, never fulfilled, that the big, the really big pike would fall into his clutches. Now the two of them only ever met in secret, not because anyone frowned upon, or even prohibited, their having contact with one another, but because that secrecy had a charm of its own. A lock on a diary lends value to even the most trivial confession.
‘He has eyes . . .’ said Mimi. ‘Very long eyelashes that stroke his cheeks. And then when he opens them . . .’ She stretched her body as the kitten had once done when you stroked it behind its ears, and even the sound she made as she did so was like a miaow.
‘You’re in love,’ said Anne-Kathrin, and was quite envious.
Mimi denied this with the vehemence of a guilty defendant. ‘And most importantly, he is my cousin.’
‘A very distant one.’
‘Yes,’ said Mimi and stretched her body again. ‘Very distant.’
‘My real name is Miriam,’ she had said to him, and he had replied, not in Yiddish but in French for once, ‘C’est dommage.’
Miriams, he had explained, were as numerous as the sequins on a ball gown, one more, one less, what did it matter? But Mimi, ah, he had only ever met one Mimi before, or rather: not really met, he had only read about her, in a novel, but even then he had thought: that is a very special name, and the person who bears it must be very special too.
‘And he is in love with you!’ When Anne-Kathrin was excited, her voice rose to a squeal. A pigeon flew up in alarm, and the two girls laughed at the silly bird as at that moment they would probably have laughed or cried over anything at all.
They were sitting in the round gazebo that Anne-Kathrin’s father the schoolmaster, who placed great importance on being out in the open, had had built at the end of his garden. To get to it, you had to pass through the whole of the long garden, past all the flowerbeds that w
ere fading away, bare and unused, at this time of year. The schoolmaster had only planted a few onions; he received his potatoes from the council, even though some people wanted to abolish this tribute on the grounds that it was old-fashioned. The flower beds were separated off by a row of rosebushes, and a big branch of an elder bush also obstructed the view. It was precisely because the gazebo was in seemingly such plain view that it was in fact an ideal hiding place.
‘He wants to get hold of the book. He wants to go all the way to Baden, he says, just to find it for me. Even though he hates such journeys, because he had to do so much marching as a soldier.’
Anne-Kathrin brought the ends of her long blonde braids together in front of her nose and squinted slightly. ‘Like a knight’, she said softly, ‘setting off to find a treasure.’ She really wanted to say ‘the Holy Grail’, but she didn’t think that was appropriate in the context of Mimi.
‘And he wants to read it to me. We just have to find a suitable spot for it. Everything’s upside down in our house at the moment, if only Pesach weren’t coming up . . . My parents, you know.’
Of course Anne-Kathrin offered her friend the gazebo for her rendezvous. The adventures of others, when you have helped to set them up, are almost like your own.
5
‘Mimi was a fille charmante,’ Janki read, translating word for word into Yiddish and sometimes, if the right expression refused to come, simply in French. ‘She was nineteen years old’ – it said ‘twenty-two’ in the book, but as his listener was nineteen, the little change seemed appropriate – ‘small, delicate and self-confident. Her face was like a preliminary sketch for the portrait of an aristocrat, but her features, delicate in their outlines and, it seemed, gently illuminated by the radiance of her clear blue eyes . . .’
Melnitz Page 5
