Salomon offered ten.
‘Your only daughter!’ said Janki.
‘If I had two,’ said Salomon, ‘I would have to divide the sum.’
Janki conceded that he might be able to try to raise the outlay required for larger amount of goods required for the new shop not in advance but, as a customer who was no longer entirely unknown, at least partly on credit, which would reduce the need for cash so that even with, let’s say sixteen thousand . . .
Salomon offered eleven.
‘You will be thought of as a tightwad,’ said Janki.
‘In my shop,’ said Salomon, ‘such a reputation can only be useful.’
One could of course, Janki reflected, keep the furnishing of the apartment as simple as possible, although he was reluctant to disappoint Mimi on a point that was so important to her. On the other hand some of her desires were very extravagant, he had to admit that, however much he loved her, like for example this fixed idea that the curtains in the drawing room had to be shantung silk, a material entirely unsuited to the purpose. If one were to cut back very severely in that area, one might perhaps with fourteen thousand . . .
Salomon offered twelve, and Janki shook on it.
Salomon had haggled for longer about many a cow from which twenty or, on a good day, thirty francs might have been made than he haggled over his daughter’s dowry, and he was disappointed by his easy victory. He would have wished Mimi to have a husband with a more precise grasp of the realities of business negotiation. From the very start he had set aside the sum of eighteen thousand francs for his daughter’s nedinye, not because eighteen is the numerical value of the lucky Chai, but simply because that sum seemed appropriate within his possibilities. Anything a son-in-law negotiated down from there, he had decided without talking to Golde on the matter, and even long before Janki’s unexpected appearance in Endingen, anything left over from eighteen thousand would go to Chanele, for whose well-being he felt entirely responsible, albeit with little emotion. But he had not expected it to be six thousand francs, enough to provide Chanele with a respectable match.
So the family was called in. Golde came sailing out of the kitchen and wanted to hug Janki straight away, but hesitated because Mimi had precedence in this respect, and finally she just stood there, hopping from one foot to the other, sucking on her lower lip. Chanele followed more slowly, wiping her hands on her apron. Her ‘Mazel Tov!’ to Janki was, to Salomon’s amazement, no more cordial than a ‘Hello’ to a chance acquaintance.
Mimi, in her room, seemed not to have heard all the shouting and had to be fetched. When she at last appeared in her mother’s wake, she looked almost insulted by the disturbance, when she turned her cheek to her fiancé for the traditional first kiss she showed neither embarrassment nor extravagant joy, and it was only when Golde held her in an apparently endless embrace that she allowed herself a triumphant glance at Chanele over Golde’s head.
‘Now that you’re a kalleh, a bride, I will have to get used to calling you Miriam,’ Salomon said with a chuckle.
With a new and fully adult gesture, his daughter brushed her curls from her forehead. ‘I’d rather stay as Mimi. It’s more unusual than Miriam. N’est-ce pas, Jean?’
‘Jean?’ thought Salomon. ‘Nu, so be it: Jean.’
The wedding was arranged for 17 December, a date when the farmers would be too busy too busy preparing for Christmas and New Year to need the services of a cattle-trader. Janki, for whom nothing could ever happen quickly enough, would have happily chosen an earlier time, but hoped – the house with the Red Shield would not be empty for ever – he would be able to ask Salomon for an advance on the dowry. In her head Golde was already drawing up lists of all the things that still needed to be organised for Mimi – clothes! Sheitel! All the monograms that would have to be embroidered into the linen for the trousseau! – and had already bitten her lip bloody out of pure excitement.
Only Mimi seemed as cool and calm as if she got engaged very day. In fact she had imagined this event with Anne-Kathrin so often and in such detail in the past that the actual process was almost a disappointment. Now at last she was standing next to Janki, they were what one calls a handsome couple, she even whispered something in his ear, but the two of them didn’t, Salomon thought, look properly happy. On the other hand when he thought back to his own engagement to Golde, to young, dainty, irresistible Golde . . . ‘Nu!’ he said out loud, and in this case it meant: ‘It will be what it is; one cannot expect too much in life.’
‘There’s one thing you must know,’ Mimi whispered in Janki’s ear. ‘I will not serve your customers. I’m not an employee.’
Since Chanele, without supplying a sensible reason, no longer wanted to work in his shop and had even rejected the offer to raise her admittedly small wage, everyday life had become hard for Janki. If he had to do something in town, as he did increasingly often because of the planned expansion, he had to close his shop and then he didn’t have a quite minute to himself. In the middle of a conversation with a joiner or a glazier – he wanted to put in big shop windows like the ones they now had in Paris – he suddenly imagined a customer deciding to buy her fabrics somewhere else from now on because of the closed shop door. Then he always concluded his discussion quite abruptly and hurried back to Metzggasse, where of course no one was waiting outside the door. In the end nothing had been done properly and half the day was lost.
It hadn’t been hard to find a girl from the country to come and clean the shop in the evening after closing time, but as he didn’t dare to leave a stranger alone with all those expensive fabrics, he always stood there impatiently as she worked, was in the way and at the same time felt irritation mounting in him daily. Monsieur Delormes had never had to concern himself with such trivia.
Janki’s search for a clerk was more difficult than expected. The only people who responded to his advertisement in the Tagblatt were young pups who smelled penetratingly of patchouli or whatever else they had poured on their handkerchiefs to mask the smell of their unwashed necks, their hair plastered with too much pomade at the temples and their clothes of such vain tastelessness that they could never have been put before a discerning clientele. They knew nothing at all about fabrics, they couldn’t tell French muslin from English tweed and showed so little interest in the material that it was quite clear: they didn’t care whether they were selling fabrics or cigars, silk or soap. A single applicant, one Oskar Ziltener, was different from the others; he was a little older, conservatively dressed, and he asked questions that revealed a surprising knowledge of the field. But Janki thought he had once seen him in passing in Schmucki & Sons textile store, and so, for fear of providing a competitor with information, did not take him on.
In the evening, when he returned at last to Endingen, he was exhausted and bad tempered; the walk, which he had undertaken without much effort for all those months, now struck him as endlessly long, probably, he said to himself in an attempt to explain the change, because it was autumn now and he had to look for most of the path in the dark. There was no food waiting for him in the kitchen now either, and more than once he went to bed hungry. When he mentioned this to Chanele, she said quite amicably that she didn’t want to deprive her friend Mimi of the opportunity to spoil her fiancé herself.
But Mimi was usually asleep, or had locked herself in her room. She spent exhausting days with tailors who had to be watched over so that they copied the patterns from the Journal des Modes properly, and with the wig-maker, not the quite good one from Schwäbisch Hall – Salomon had not approved the money for her – but the one from Lengnau who, if you weren’t careful, made you a sheitel in which you looked as old as Mother Feigele.
But above all Mimi had social obligations, in so far as one could speak of society in a village like Endingen. It was neither customary nor necessary formerly to announce an engagement; no official proclamation could have kept pace with the speed of rumour. When Mimi walked through the village, and for the first few days there
were many opportunities for such walks, people spoke to her and congratulated her on all sides. Furthermore, an old superstition from the days when people still believed in the evil eye, the name of her future husband was never mentioned, since to utter his name with hers before the wedding would have brought misfortune. People only talked about ‘the man-to-be’ or ‘the happy one’, and Mimi, enjoying every second at the centre of attention, became increasingly practised at turning her head away bashfully as a shy young bride, and even blushing.
At last, and she couldn’t have said whether she was looking forward to the moment or dreading it, she bumped into Pinchas. She saw him coming from a long way off, long and gaunt, with a heavy package on his shoulder, his knee bending under its weight with every step he took. When he came closer, the package turned out to be a quarter of beef wrapped in sackcloth. One end protruded from the canvas, the obscene wound of a freshly amputated soldier.
They both stopped. Mimi arranged the curls at the back of her neck, a gesture that allowed her to bend her torso backwards and thus set off her figure to good effect. Pinchas vacillated back and forth as if he wasn’t sure whether to walk towards Mimi or run away from her. But perhaps it was also partly because of the weight he was carrying. You could tell by his face that he was formulating one sentence after another, rejecting and choking it back, and immediately assembling the next one, which wasn’t right either. In his cheeks, under his thin beard, muscles twitched as if his jaw first had to grind the words to tiny pieces, and his Adam’s apple rose and fell as if it were having difficulty swallowing.
At last it was Mimi who opened the conversation. ‘What were you thinking of,’ she said reproachfully, ‘sending Singer to my house?’
‘I wanted . . .’ Pinchas gulped again. ‘I wanted you to know . . .’
‘I’ve known for a long time, Pinchas.’ She smiled at him and felt like that other Mimi, the one with the book who went with strange men without marrying them. ‘But as I told you . . .’
‘Our hearts don’t sing the same tune.’
He had remembered the sentence and repeated it now, a pupil who may not have understood his lesson, but has learned it conscientiously by heart.
‘That’s exactly how it is, Pinchas.’ A shame that Anne-Kathrin couldn’t see her now, very much the grande dame, at once friendly and unapproachable.
‘But . . .’ Pinchas was swaying more and more under his burden. ‘But . . . A person can learn to sing.’
‘It’s too late.’ The sentence had appeared in many novels, and Mimi had always been touched by its finality.
‘I would like . . .’ said Pinchas. At one spot oxblood had seeped through the sackcloth and was slowly spreading. Mimi found herself being reminded of the bandage that Janki had worn on the very first evening. ‘Luckily it’s not my blood,’ he had said.
‘I would like . . .’ Pinchas repeated. ‘His tongue was playing in the gap between his teeth as if it had a life of its own. ‘I need to talk to you again. Can’t we meet? In the gazebo, at your friend’s house? Please.’
‘That’s impossible!’ But then Mimi saw that the bloodstain had already spread to Pinchas’s shoulder, and for some reason she was so touched by the sight of it that she whispered something to him that she hadn’t even wanted to say.
Pinchas would have reached his arms out to her, but he had to hold on tight to the quarter of beef.
It wasn’t until the weekend that Mimi and Janki found time for one another. On Shabbos morning they walked to the synagogue side by side, Mimi with her hair pinned up, you had to exploit the fact while you were still allowed to show your own hair. They arrived as a couple and, when they entered the square, raised their heads together to look at the village clock, which in Endingen is mounted on the synagogue tower. From the women’s shul Mimi could then watch Janki being summoned to read from the Torah, the first after Kauhen and Levi. After he had sung the blessing, a woman leaned forward to her and said, ‘He has a beautiful voice.’
From her seat in the front row, right next to Golde, looking through the grid she could also see Pinchas and his father, two long, narrow figures who looked even more haggard in their white prayer shawls than they did in everyday life. Pinchas often stood alone at his lectern, because Naftali, the shammes, was constantly busy and scurried around the synagogue, here reminding someone of a mitzvah, there interrupting a noisy private conversation with a violent ‘Sha!’ None the less, Pinchas, who must have known exactly where she habitually sat, never turned his head upwards, as many men apparently stretch their necks at random before flicking to the next passage in the prayer book. He had pulled the tallis over his head and was rocking back and forth with concentration, someone with a very special request to make of God.
Mimi and Janki did not walk back together. It was the custom for the women always to leave the synagogue before the end of the service, so that the men, when they came home hungry, didn’t have to wait for their meal, the traditional Shabbos seder.
At the seudah they now sat side by side at table. The place at the end, which had naturally fallen to the newcomer Janki back then, was now taken by Chanele. She seemed content with that. It was closer to the door from there, and she was often needed in the kitchen for quite a long time.
Golde, who had always been an impatient eater, now often left her plate untouched, so preoccupied was her mind with planning all the details of the wedding festivities. And not only that. She was already compiling courses of meals for circumcisions and drawing up lists of invitations for Bar Mitzvahs. At the same time she had to admit, and wasn’t even ashamed of it, that she was even more pleased for Janki than for Mimi. He filled a hole in her life, a hole that she noticed only now that she was barely present.
Salomon hadn’t seen his wife as happy and lost in herself for ages, and that did him good too. He was even more talkative than usual and told the stories he always told when he was in a good mood: the one about the farmer he had told that in Jewish byres the cows had to be fed with matzohs at Pesach, and who had asked in all seriousness if that didn’t spoil the milk, and the one about the goyish cattle trader who refused to believe that the cow they were trading had only calved once, and whom he finally persuaded with the words, ‘May my tochus go blind if I tell a lie!’ and who had actually believed that the tochus was a relative and not simply his backside.
Janki laughed long and loud about each of those stories, which made Salomon like him more and more.
That the bridal couple talked very little to one another no one noticed – except perhaps for Chanele. But she kept having to jump up and attend to something urgent in the kitchen.
Salomon made Janki – ‘Now that you are yourself a balebos, you will have to practise!’ – say the table blessing, and even tried to find the right notes when Janki sang quite different tunes during their communal singing from the ones they were used to in Endingen. Afterwards Salomon stretched pointedly and explained that the old people – ‘Isn’t that so, Golde?’ – had to go and lie down for a while now, that heavy food and everything, the young ones, he was quite sure, would – ‘Isn’t that so, Janki?’ – be quite capable of passing their time without them. When Golde didn’t come to the stairs with him quickly enough, he admonished her to hurry with a ‘Nu!’.
Chanele had closed the kitchen door, whether for the sake of discretion or for other reasons; Janki and Mimi were alone in the drawing room. They were still sitting at the table, which had been cleared of dishes, but whose white tablecloth, a post-feast menu, listed all the delicacies that Golde had prepared for today, in hieroglyphics of sauce-stains and crumbs.
Mimi pushed her chair closer, until Janki could have put his arm around her waist without stretching. He didn’t seem to notice the opportunity, or perhaps, even though it didn’t quite seem part of his character, he was simply shy. She let her head drop onto his shoulder and closed her eyes. Janki made a movement that raised her hopes, but he had only been making himself more comfortable in his chair. Anne-Ka
thrin was right: men were like little boys, you had to show them the way.
Without opening her eyes, just pressing her head more firmly into the hollow formed by his shoulder and his neck, she started speaking, her lips on his skin, so that he could feel her voice more than he could hear it. ‘Oh, Rodolphe,’ she said, ‘Rodolphe, Rodolphe, Rodolphe.’
‘Pardon me?’ asked Janki.
She straightened up and let her curls brush his cheek. ‘Do you love your Mimi just a teeny bit?’
‘Of course,’ said Janki. There was something in his voice that Mimi took for arousal. Chanele, who had been able to observe Janki very precisely for a few weeks, would have described it as impatience.
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