‘That night Paris enjoyed a spectacle unparalleled in the annals of wars and sieges. A member of parliament appeared in the front box holding a white flag, and handed the German officer a letter addressed to his most senior commander. No one will ever know what the King of Tailors wrote to the King of Prussia, but it is well known that François Delormes supplied many royal houses, and that a manikin with the exact measurements of the Prussian monarch stood in his studio for many years.
‘Be that as it may, it is a fact confirmed by a considerable number of witnesses that on that same night a heavily laden cart, drawn by four horses, rolled out of Paris and through a cordon of Hessian hussars on the road to Colmar.
‘In the early morning of the following day François Delormes was mown down in a reckless grenade attack from a very short distance. Nothing was left of him but his hand, with which he had wielded the needle more masterfully than any other.’
Anne-Kathrin dried her eyes with the red silk ribbon that held her braid together, and Mimi too felt strangely moved.
‘But the moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.’ (Anne-Kathrin.) ‘The receiver of this unusual transport, the only person that François Delormes had considered worthy as his successor, knew not the slightest of any of these events, for he lay unconscious in a German military hospital, his delicate yet manly face’ (Mimi) ‘aglow with fever. The Carmelites who tended to him self-sacrificingly, had long since abandoned all hope for him.
‘How does a French soldier end up in a German military hospital? Many of our readers may rightly ask that question. But here too we must mention a whole concatenation of events behind which one may, however devoted one might be to the factuality of modern science, see the hand of providence.
‘François Delormes’ inheritor had been hit in the leg by a bullet in the great battle of Sedan, but dragged, with an effort that we can only describe as superhuman, another soldier who seemed to be more seriously wounded than he was himself, out of the deadly rain of bullets.’
‘Wonderful,’ said Mimi.
‘There’s better to come,’ said Pinchas, delighted by her praise.
‘This other man, whose life he saved with his heroic deed, was not a Frenchman, but a Prussian soldier. Seldom has it been possible to confirm so beautifully that the voice of humanity knows neither states nor borders. And so it came to pass that the two men, the rescuer and the rescued man, were operated upon the same day and lay bed by bed, in the same field hospital. One of them recovered. The other, whose wounds were inflamed, spent a long time waiting on the narrow ridge that divides this world from the next.’
‘Media in vita in morte sumus,’ Anne-Kathrin suggested, and Pinchas wrote it down.
From then on, the job became easier and easier. Pinchas, who was for the first time able to put his imagination, those pointless daydreams as his mother called them, to good use, wrote faster and faster. Only a paragraph later Janki opened his big sad eyes, modestly dismissed the attestations of gratitude from the soldier whose life he had just saved, and returned at last to his home town of Colmar – ‘No, Miriam, absolutely not Guebwiller!’ There to his inexpressible surprise he found the fabrics . . .
‘. . . fabrics which have particular value not just because of their origins in the famous studio of the tragically departed François Delormes, but perhaps still more the fact that they left Paris even before the great plague of rats that our correspondent has so vividly evoked, and are thus hygienically quite unimpeachable.’
‘Yes!’ said Mimi and clenched her fist.
‘Their owner who, after all the dramatic events that he lived through at such a very young age, yearns for nothing so much as tranquillity, decided to emigrate to the peaceful land of Helvetia, where he could offer his unexpected treasure-trove on sale to a select clientele. Avoiding any public brouhaha, he has asked us not to mention his name, a request with which we are of course more than happy to comply. So we must content ourselves with revealing to our honoured readership that Jean M. has set up his modest shop in one of the oldest and certainly one of the most beautiful towns in our Canton, and that the shop is open every day apart from Saturday and Sunday between the hours of nine in the morning and seven in the evening.’
‘You’re meshuga!’ said Janki. ‘What will I do if anyone asks me whether it’s all true?’
Mimi smiled a conspiratorial smile. ‘You deny it all, of course. Not a word is true, you say. Or it’s about a completely different Jean M. Pinchas says if you say it’s a lie everybody will believe it.’
It hadn’t even been difficult to place the story in the paper. Anne-Kathrin, who as the daughter of a schoolmaster had the loveliest handwriting, copied the text out neatly, and a market driver who was going to Baden anyway dropped it off at the editorial office. The editor was a queer customer who saw himself as a bit of a scholar, and who devoted more attention to the four-volume History of the County of Baden, upon which he had been working for years, than he did to the contents of his newspaper. He scanned the article briefly and then sent the office boy to take it to the setter.
‘“Master pupil!”’ said Janki furiously. ‘I was a shlattenschammes! I worked in the textile warehouse!’
‘You want to sell textiles too,’ Mimi replied, thinking, ‘He should be grateful to me. Why’s he getting so worked up?’
On the stroke of nine the first customer was waiting outside the shop door on the Vordere Metzggasse. When it remained shut in spite of her knocking, she went home again and said to her cook, ‘He hasn’t come today. His injury is probably causing him too much pain.’
‘Sedan!’ said Janki. ‘I don’t know anything more about the battle than the things people say about it!’
‘Neither does anyone else,’ said Mimi.
In a barber’s shop in Baden a customer reading a newspaper was so startled by something he had just read that he jumped, jerking his head so violently that the razor cut deep into his cheek. ‘Be careful, Bruppbacher!’ he cried furiously. The barber’s wife slipped from her high chair and brought alum and a cloth to dab the blood from his grey suit.
‘And I’m not going to Baden!’ Janki said for the third time. ‘Never again.’ He hooked his fingers together behind the back of the chair as if someone were trying to pull him away.
‘So that man was right? Selling out because of the abandonment of the business?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Janki. ‘But . . .’
‘You have a visitor.’
Even before Chanele could ask him in, the schoolmaster had pushed his way into the room, flying out of the corridor like a cork out of a bottle, talking already. ‘Mon cher Monsieur! And, oh yes, Fräulein Meijer. My compliments. I guessed as much! Is that not so? I felt it. Unless you feel, naught will you ever gain. If everyone is after you now, don’t forget that I was the one who invited you first. My popular education association! You must be our first guest. You must. As soon as it has been founded. Oh, such furore there will be! Furore, I tell you. No smoke, no mirrors.’ He waved a walking stick with a carved handle as if conducting an orchestra.
‘I don’t quite understand what you . . .’
The schoolmaster nodded, as if he had no intention of stopping. ‘Discretion, I understand. “Jean M.” and not a letter more. My lips are sealed. Whether it’s Meili or Müller or – I only suggest this as an example, purely theoretical – or Meijer, it matters not in the slightest. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But when I opened the Tagblatt today, it was clear to me straight away . . . Oh my apprehensive soul!’
‘The article to which you are probably referring has nothing to do with me!’
Pinchas had not been mistaken: only now did the schoolmaster fully believe the story.
‘Such exemplary modesty!’ he crowed. ‘I knew at once. But I should still like to make one request. If you happened to have a fabric in your storeroom that would suit a young girl . . . Do you know my daughter? Of course you don’t. Why should you? She hardly
ever sets foot outside the door. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen. A piece of fabric, as I say, for a dress. Not too dear, obviously. As a schoolmaster one doesn’t have two pennies to rub together. Although: Non scholae sed vitae . . . But I don’t want to hold you up. Please forgive the intrusion, Fräulein Meijer.’
He stopped in the doorway, came back and laid his walking stick on the table. ‘Here. I nearly forgot this. For you. After such an injury you will certainly find walking far less strenuous with something to lean on. The handle is a lion. The most heroic of beasts for the most heroic of men. But never forget, my young friend: brave can be the merest slave. Discretion is the better part of valour. It has been a pleasure, Herr Meijer. A real pleasure.’
Janki’s shop was not exactly overrun, but neither did he have to wait so much as half a day or even half an hour for custom. It was the old women and the very young women who discovered the French Drapery before everyone else. At first they visited the vault out of curiosity, and probably whispered when the elegant young Frenchman brought a heavy bale of fabric from a shelf – with one hand! – and hid his limp so bravely. At first Janki took his stick reluctantly to the shop, but soon he found himself reaching for it without even thinking, indeed, that he felt something was missing if he wasn’t holding it in his hand. And what was wrong with that? If Salomon had an umbrella, why should Janki not have a stick?
Very gradually he became used, when walking, to letting one leg – not always the same one, until in the end he settled on the right one – drag very slightly behind the other and sometimes, particularly when he had been standing behind his counter for a while, it seemed to him that he could actually feel a dull ache in it. When his customers asked him questions, which – and this was a pleasant side effect as far as his revenue was concerned – they thought appropriate only after the third or fourth visit, he only shook his head and smiled wistfully, which could be interpreted either as regret over the persistence of a ridiculous story, or as a painful memory. It became customary among the better ladies of the town to try out on him the French that they had picked up in their afternoon conversation circles, and Jean Meijer not only understood them, but praised their pronunciation.
The cramped space of the cellar proved to be more and more of an advantage. In the French Drapery one felt as if one were not in a shop but in a salon, as if one were not a customer, but a guest, and if Janki, as sometimes happened, had to send a customer away because at that moment sadly, sadly, there was simply no more room for her, he filled all the others with pride.
There was also the fact that Janki really did know something about fabrics, and his goods, whether one really believed in their mythological origins or not, were of good quality. It was not long before he was able to order new fabric from Paris for the first time, and soon the doors over the shelves were to close only at the end of the day; there were no more gaps to hide, and as the press of customers grew there was no more time to be wasted on superficial fripperies.
The man in the grey suit was never seen again, but Janki sensed his undiminished interest behind the intensified attention that the market police paid him and his shop on an almost daily basis. Once when he offered the inspectors a special discount on purchases made by their wives, something that would have been par for the course in Paris, they even threatened him to report him to the governor for attempted bribery.
‘I will have to engage a clerk,’ he said in the kitchen one evening.
Very much to Salomon’s annoyance the orderly rhythm of life in the Meijer household had been thrown increasingly out of kilter. At dinner they all waited until Janki was back from Baden, and he was often late, although lately he had been recognised more and more often, and was therefore given lifts by carts and even carriages. Salomon could drum reproachfully on the table top as much as he wanted, his impatient ‘Nu?’ was simply ignored. Once Golde even asked him, ‘Is it too much to ask for you to wait a few minutes for the boy?’ ‘For the boy,’ she said, as if this Janki weren’t just a shnorrer who’d wandered in from somewhere, a shnorrer who happened to be a relative, fair enough, but a shnorrer none the less.
And when he did finally deign to arrive, in boots that Salomon had given him, and carrying that ridiculous walking stick, he didn’t even apologise for keeping the head of the household waiting with his stomach rumbling, but let the three women of the house go clucking around him, dancing around him as if he were the Golden Calf, did all the talking at the table, talked about his constantly rising profits and the new, even bigger order that he planned to make over the next few days, and if he did once in a while ask about Salomon’s business deals, the question had, in Salomon’s ears, a certain condescending quality, like someone with twenty cows in the byre kindly inquiring about his neighbour’s rabbits. No, in those first few weeks Salomon was not happy about Janki’s success. He saw himself being displaced from the centre of the family, he sensed a hidden irony behind every politesse, an ageing territorial prince spotting conspiracies everywhere, unable to show his annoyance because it would have been interpreted as envy. But what Janki had said a moment before, That was going too far. Engaging a clerk! And perhaps a liveried coachman and a valet while he was about it?
‘I have run my business on my own for a lifetime and it has done me no harm whatsoever,’ said Salomon. He reached his hand out towards the bowl of coleslaw and noted with satisfaction that Golde, Mimi and Chanele all leapt up at once to pass it to him. ‘Employees cost more than they’re worth.’
‘A textile shop and a cattle-trading business aren’t the same thing,’ Janki objected.
‘Quite right,’ said Salomon. ‘Cows need to be fed and watered and milked. Even on Shabbos. Even at Yontev. Do you have to do that to your bales of fabric, too? Exactly! But does that mean I take on a stable boy? No. You pay a peasant a few francs. You organise yourself. You find a way. And you want a clerk for your little shop?’
‘I could take better care of my customers if I had someone to do the little things. The till, for example . . .’
‘The till?’ Salomon was so worked up that he almost choked on his herb salad. ‘Just put a sign on the door: “Ganev wanted!” Or put it in the paper. Maybe Pinchas Pomeranz will write you a nice article. “Since the battlefield of Sedan, where a bullet struck his red Morocco money bag” – Salomon had always known more about things than Mimi was entirely happy with – “since that time Jean M. has been uncomfortable in the presence of money, so he is looking for someone to take it from him.” If I have learned something in my life, it is this: you do not let anyone, whether Jew or Goy, anywhere near your till!’ God’s voice from the burning bush could not have sounded more threatening.
‘And what if he employed a relative?’ asked Golde.
‘What sort of relative? Uncle Eisik from Lengnau, who people only give work to because they have rachmones on him? Or do you want to go and work in Janki’s shop, perhaps? Or Mimi?’
Chanele cleared her throat. She looked different lately, and no one could really explain why.
‘I’d like to try something else,’ said Chanele.
10
She plucked a few hairs every day, only a very few. She pinched each one individually with the tweezers, gripped it tightly as one grips the throat of an enemy that one has finally, finally managed to get hold of, pressed the ends of the tiny pliers together as firmly as she could, did it so violently that her whole arm quivered, and then pulled the hair out with a jerk. She enjoyed the short, stinging pain associated with it every time, couldn’t wait for it and yet dragged it out just as Salomon like to draw out the redeeming sneeze after a pinch of snuff. Sometimes she let go of a hair she had gripped, granted it a reprieve without, however, lifting the death sentence, looked for another and a third, let the tweezers gently and with cold delicacy stroke the spot where the nose passes into the brow. On other days she was so filled with impatience, furious, painful impatience, that instead of a hair she gripped the skin and tore out whole chunks of her
self and then had to cover the bleeding wound with a piece of gauze and tell Golde she had been sweeping crumbs and had bumped into the edge of the table when she stood up.
She did it all without light, just with the feeling in her fingers, just as a blind man, they say, if he is hungry enough, will find a handful of scattered grains on a gravel path. She bolted the door to her room, shut the shades in the middle of the day and, if too much light pierced the cracks, hung a bed-sheet over it and then sat down before the shell-framed mirror that Salomon had brought her from the market in Zurzach for her twelfth birthday. At twelve you were a woman, and women, he had said with a laugh at the time, like to make themselves beautiful. How little he knew her! She sat at the mirror, in which nothing was reflected, felt for the tweezers which – as long as you’re hungry enough! – she always found as soon as she reached her hand out, and clicked the ends together a few times, making them sound like those insects that you hear on the leaves on quiet summer nights. Then, always slightly breathless, she began her ritual.
Afterwards she didn’t look at herself in a mirror, on principle, she sought the change in her image only in the gaze of others, she was glad when their eyes rested on her for longer than usual and sought an answer without noticing the question. She didn’t become vain, that would have been too out of keeping with her character, but in the morning she hesitated longer than usual when she had to choose between her few dresses. Once, only once, she had gone almost all the way downstairs with her hair down, her freshly combed hair that fell far below her shoulders, before hurrying back to her room and wrapping it again in her net.
At work in Baden she always wore the brown dress with the cambric trim. It was a kind of inconspicuous uniform, into which she slipped every day in the back room of the shop. By so doing she changed not only her appearance but also her name, because in front of the customers Janki insisted on addressing her as Mademoiselle Hanna. Mademoiselle Hanna took the ladies’ coats and parasols, brought, if the choice between one material and another was taking longer than usual, a chair from the back room, or accompanied a lapdog to the nearest corner. And she handed out tea, not the proper, dark brown, sugary tea they drank at home in Endingen, but a thin, weak infusion for which she had to fetch hot water from the brewery next door, before serving it in tiny cups. Something that was taken for granted in Paris was an unheard-of novelty in Baden and soon, for the few families who constituted the better circles of the little town, it was considered the height of elegance to drop in for a little cup with Frenchman Meijer, to chat for a quarter of an hour, ask to see a few bolts of material more for the sake of entertainment than because one really needed something. Of course one bought, too; one could hardly steal the time of that good man who had been through so much.
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