‘So that’s how it is,’ said Janki.
He had run after her because Chanele had wanted him to. He had been in such confusion that he would have done anything Chanele had asked of him, that is: almost anything. You have to remain sensible and you can’t lose sight of important concerns. He had wanted to set Mimi’s head straight, perhaps in fact using the example of Chanele, who understood that some things were possible and some were not. He had wanted to make up with Mimi, they were engaged after all, and he had heard Monsieur Delormes say often enough, ‘As a business relationship begins, so it usually remains.’
He hadn’t come creeping after her, he hadn’t hidden himself. That hadn’t been necessary, either, because Mimi didn’t turn around once, she walked through the narrow alleyways at a quick, defiant trot. At first he had thought she just wanted to be alone, as he himself had on the day the shop opened – less than half a year had passed since then, and it seemed so long ago. He had thought she was just after a bit of peace and quiet, just as he had taken the path via the Nussbaumener Hörnlio to think everything through once more, and it struck him as a good sign that she wanted to think about things again. But then it had quickly become apparent the she had a predetermined destination in mind. She was hurrying not away from something, but towards something.
Towards someone.
He hadn’t heard what the two of them had said to one another. They were speaking too quietly, and he was standing too far away. The gap in the hedge was directly behind the gazebo, and because of the boards that formed the back of the bench that ran around in a hexagon, one couldn’t have a complete view. But the kiss he had seen, it had been impossible to ignore, he had seen the look of surprise on Pinchas’s face, and then the happy one, and the way his black hat tipped backwards and the way Mimi didn’t let go of him.
‘So that’s how it is,’ he had said, and now, in retrospect, he thought he might have phrased it better.
Mimi was crying; perhaps she was crying. She had thrown her hands to her face and sat crouching at her end of the bench, a child awaiting a smack. Pinchas had immediately leapt to his feet and placed himself in front of Mimi, but she had pushed him away, and now he was standing forlornly in the middle of the gazebo, exactly where the little table had been when they had written their article that time. He stood there, his tongue in the gap in his teeth, and looked as if he were about to launch into a speech. But he said only, ‘It’s my fault, Janki, all mine,’ and Mimi lowered her hands for a moment, said, ‘Oh, shut up, Pinchas!’ and disappeared behind the cover of her hands once more.
And then the schoolmaster emerged from between the rosebushes and the elder bush, in his shirt sleeves and with a big green apron, beamed across the whole of his sweaty face and said, ‘Ah, Monsieur Meijer! Dear young friend! You I had not expected in the antechamber. Emilia Galotti. And Fräulein Meijer! And Herr . . . Yes, yes, the later the evening, the lovelier the guests. Welcome to my Tusculum! Even though you, I fear, are waiting here not for me but for my daughter. I will fetch her at once. One second and she will be there. I go, I go. Look how I go. Swifter than an arrow from the Tartar’s bow!’
13
It was a small event that made Janki’s decision final, an event without any real significance of its own.
That Sabbath afternoon, after a very embarrassing encounter with Anne-Kathrin, he had come home with Mimi. Salomon had nodded knowingly to Golde when the two of them came in, and pointedly just happened to whistle to himself the song of the bride and groom, ‘Chossen, Kalleh, Mazel tov’. That chossen and kalleh hardly exchanged a word with one another Salomon put down to a natural bashfulness, one could after all imagine that the two of them had not just chatted and talked about the weather on their walk together. From that point onwards Mimi and Janki were so strikingly polite with one another, saying ‘Another drop of coffee?’ and ‘Will it bother you if I open the window?’ that Golde whispered to Salomon that there was nothing lovelier than young happiness, and she could watch the two of them for hours.
A post horse trots to the next stop without a coachman, and so on Monday Janki was in Baden again, he opened his shop on time and smiled politely as he served his customers. He even went as agreed to view a flat, diagonally opposite the House of the Red Shield, where one would be able to look right across from the drawing room to the new shop windows. The owner of the house, a certain Herr Bäschli, was an old man in a grandfatherly frock coat, and had the habit of rubbing his hands constantly together, not in a circular, soapy way, but with his fingers outstretched as if it was winter and he just couldn’t make himself warm. He had a hardware shop, as he called it, on the ground floor of the same house, more of a cabinet of curiosities, with shelves full of vases and paintings, but also old butter churns and broken spinning wheels. After the viewing – ‘Think about it in peace, take your time, there’s no hurry’ – he insisted that Janki look around the shop with him, anyone starting a new household needed all sorts of things, and many a one had found quite unexpected objects in his shop, things they had been looking for all along without even being aware of it.
Janki itched to be back at Vordere Metzggasse, where, even though the early afternoon was usually a very quiet time, a customer might be waiting, but out of politeness he did as Herr Bäschli wished. First of all the old man offered him a pair of brass lamps, shaped like Ionic columns, their flutes still stuck with the wax of long extinguished candles. ‘A Jewish household needs candelabras,’ Herr Bäschli said with the pride of a scholar who is finally able to apply a bit of obscure book-learning to everyday life. Even the painting of a bearded man, so darkened as to be almost unrecognisable – ‘It could be a rabbi!’ – failed to attract Janki’s interest. He was about to take his leave, when Herr Bäschli assured him, rubbing his hands together the while, that he still had something very special, something that he didn’t show to every customer, it came from a very elegant house and Janki absolutely had to look at it. From a wardrobe painted in the rustic style – ‘Also for sale, but I don’t think it’s something for you’ – he took a strange silver device in which a crystal bottle was enclosed. ‘A tantalus,’ said Herr Bäschli proudly. ‘I don’t know if you have ever interested yourself in the Greek myths. Tantalus was the man who, standing in water, had to suffer thirst for ever.’ He moved the enclosed bottle back and forth in front of the window. It was almost entirely filled with a shimmering, gold liquid that started to glow in the sunlight. ‘A decent drop, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Herr Bäschli. ‘Far too decent to let any Tom, Dick or Harry get anywhere near. That’s why there’s this seal up at the top, do you see? However thirsty your maid might be, she won’t be having a drink from this. Only someone with the key can take the bottle out.’ He set the tantalus down in front of Janki and rubbed his hands still more violently together. ‘That is the little catch of the matter. There is no key. But it also looks so very decorative, on a sideboard or in a cabinet. I will give you a very good price. A particularly good price because, to be honest, I imagine it must be terrible to spend a lifetime looking at something that one can never have.’
That was the moment, the precise moment, when Janki made his decision. Perhaps there was a logical connection between the tantalus that he bought from Herr Bäschli without haggling, and what happened next, but Janki didn’t think about it. He was a person who was only really alive when he was in a hurry, and he couldn’t remember ever being in such a hurry as this.
He didn’t open his shop, he just went there for a moment to put the tantalus in the middle of the counter, he didn’t even leave a message for that lump from the village who would wait outside the locked door, waiting in vain for his cleaning supervision. ‘I will pay her for her trouble anyway,’ he decided. That didn’t matter right now.
On the country road his walking stick felt like a nuisance. You couldn’t really take it round with you if you had no time to limp. Even though he was walking more quickly than usual, on the way he saw only things that had never attract
ed his attention before. One mossy end of an old border stone between two communities protruded from the ground; one could imagine a column sprouting from it, like asparagus. A garden fence, with a swallow sitting on each pole, smartly dressed petitioners in an official’s antechamber. A nut tree, broad and massive, that reminded him of his grandfather sitting over his tomes at the table in the window, always knowing everything.
Untidy clouds drifted with him, and seemed to be in just as much of a hurry as he was himself, and in between them the autumn sun, faint now, was trying with one final effort to warm the world again, an old man realising far too late what he has missed in life. Hanging in the air was a smell of burnt wood; the hearths seemed already to be practising for the winter, which would very soon be there.
The journey had never been so quick. He must, without noticing, almost have been running, because when he saw the roofs of the village in front of him he was out of breath. He tried to collect himself, to find a posture corresponding to his decision, he used his walking stick again and even limped a little. By the time he arrived in front of the house with the two doors, he was Jean Meijer once more, a matter-of-fact businessman who knew how to make decisions and, if necessary, correct mistakes.
The front door was locked, and no one responded to his knocking.
Salomon was probably out and about doing business, Golde would be drinking coffee somewhere, at Picard or Wyler, and complaining, full of anticipatory joy, about the upheavals of the imminent wedding, and Mimi would either be sitting at Anne-Kathrin’s, or would have found an illustration in the latest Journal des Modes that she urgently needed to show the tailor. But Chanele, surely Chanele must be at home!
Janki hammered on the door until Frau Oggenfuss poked her head disapprovingly out of a window on her half of the house. When she recognised Janki, she smiled politely, because since he had become not only a customer, but also a draper, she had the greatest respect for him ‘All flown away,’ she called. ‘Can I do anything for you?’
No, Frau Oggenfuss couldn’t do anything for him.
He found Chanele at Red Moische’s. He could see them through the window in the door, standing by the barrel of pickled gherkins. The gherkins were sold by the piece and not by weight, and Chanele was checking with a severe expression on her face whether Moische wasn’t taking unnecessarily small specimens out of the container for her.
She was wearing the brown dress that had hung on its hanger in the backroom of the drapery store for so long. The white cambric trimmings could only be seen at the sleeves, because the weather was cooler now, and Chanele had put a dark blue scarf around her neck. ‘The colours don’t go well together,’ Janki thought and noticed without surprise that this was the thought of an owner, not an observer.
He walked up and down outside the shop, paused now and then and threw his head back as if to etch on his memory the excessively long sign on the shop. General Goods and Grocery Store Moses Bollag, it said, and next to it, in a space far-sightedly set aside for the purpose, but in different writing: & Sons.
Chanele was now standing at the counter, and seemed to be haggling over something. Red Moische, known for his pettiness, was shaking his head and using, economical as he was, the same movement to scratch his head. His hair was no longer quite as red as it must have been in his youth.
There was not much to look at in the narrow alley, but Janki studied every door-arch, every ledge, every flowerpot on a windowsill. What was taking Chanele so long? They now had, he’d seen his customers with them, pocket watches for women. Perhaps one needed to . . . ‘One thing at a time, Janki,’ he interrupted himself. ‘One thing at a time.’
Red Moische, you could clearly tell from his slumped shoulders, even through the dirty window, had had to give in. He threw a handful of – what was that? Corks? – into Chanele’s shopping basket and turned very ungraciously away. Chanele hung her basket over her arm. Janki took three very quick steps away from the door. And then they were facing one another.
‘What do you need corks for?’ asked Janki. It wasn’t at all what he had intended to say, it had just slipped out.
‘To rub the cutlery to stop it getting rusty,’ said Chanele.
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Janki.
‘There’s lots you don’t know.’
She didn’t seem surprised to see him, or at least she didn’t ask any questions. She set off for home, and let him walk beside her.
‘Shall I carry your basket?’ asked Janki.
‘I would never ask that of a war invalid.’
‘I need to talk to you,’ said Janki.
‘If you need to, you need to.’
‘Couldn’t we . . .?’
‘You want to talk, I don’t.’
Chanele didn’t slow down at all. And so he had to tell her in a great rush about his big decision, about the mistake that he had only just recognised – ‘But it isn’t too late to correct it!’ – he had to divulge his reflections right there in the middle of the alley, that in the end what mattered was not the dowry, but that someone knew how to muck in, he had to jump over a puddle that hadn’t quite dried, as he explained to her that Mimi loved someone else anyway – ‘She kissed him in front of my very eyes!’ – and that it would therefore be more correct if, when things still hadn’t been made official, he followed logic to its conclusion and . . .
He hadn’t finished his sentence when they arrived at the front door and Chanele stopped for the first time.
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ she asked, as if he hadn’t been talking away at her all that time.
‘Will you marry me?’
Chanele’s only reaction was to switch the heavy basket from one arm to the other. ‘Certainement pas, Monsieur Jean,’ she said and disappeared into the house.
If Janki actually had been in Sedan, amidst the roar of the cannon and the hail of the bullets, he wouldn’t have needed as much courage as he did for his conversation with Salomon. It was the fear of Salomon’s reaction, of course, but above all he needed the courage for himself. He had wanted to switch from one ship to another, while he was still safely in the harbour, and now there was no second ship for him to switch to, and he still had to get out, that much was clear to him, he had to jump into the water and swim and he didn’t even know where the shore was.
Salomon, the cattle-trader, didn’t bat an eyelid, took a pinch of tobacco, sneezed, just drummed his fingers on the table and tried to read Janki’s face.
‘We’d agreed twelve thousand,’ he said.
‘It isn’t about the money.’
Salomon went on drumming. In his experience it was always about the money.
‘Is there a reason?’ he asked.
Janki nodded.
‘Nu?’
‘I would rather not talk about it.’
‘Mimi!’ At lots of cattle markets Salomon had learned to be very noisy without making much of an effort. His massive body didn’t move, his eyes remained fixed on Janki and his fingers went on drumming, without losing their rhythm. But in the other half of the house Frau Oggenfuss looked at her husband and said, ‘There’s fire in the roof.’
Mimi didn’t allow herself any of the hesitations with which she otherwise liked to inflate her own importance a little, but a moment later she was standing in the room.
‘Your chossen wants to cancel the chuppah. Do you know why?’
‘I know why,’ said Mimi.
‘You don’t know,’ thought Janki.
‘Do you want to tell me?’
Mimi shook her head.
Salomon ran his fingers through his whiskers, apparently looking for something that he’d lost and urgently needed to find. Mimi and Janki stood there and didn’t look at one another.
‘Nu,’ said Salomon at last. And it meant: ‘What we have here is a shlimazl, but at least no one has died.’
‘I’m going to find myself a flat in Baden,’ said Janki. ‘That will be better.’
‘Yes,’ said Salomon. �
��That will be better.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Janki.
No one took the hand that he extended, so he walked in silence to the door.
‘You forgot your stick,’ said Salomon. ‘And your limp.’
Only now did Mimi start to cry.
Abraham Singer giggled.
He was sitting in the kitchen of Sarah Pomeranz, and had had three pieces of her famous marble cake – ‘The best I have ever put in my mouth, may all my teeth fall out if I tell a lie!’ – had reported on a birth in Neu-Breisach and a funeral in Strasbourg, had told all his stories, about the coachman whose horse is stolen, and about the three pedlars who fall in the stream, and then, after all the usual detours, had actually come round to the actual reason for his visit, and had at that precise moment begun to laugh for no reason at all. He had been giggling so helplessly for several minutes now that his little body just shook, and coughed crumbs of marble cake into his checked handkerchief.
Singer’s attacks of laughter were so well known that you could even make jokes about them, like the one comparing him to the famous Frankfur Cantor Lachmann. ‘What’s the difference between Lachmann and Singer? Lachmann sings, and Singer laughs.’ Nonetheless, Sarah and Nafali had never seen him as he was now, sitting there wiggling his little legs with uncontrollable delight. And he seemed to want something important from them; he had insisted, not directly, of course, that wasn’t his way, but with unmistakable hints, that Naftali be fetched from the butcher’s shop to join them. And now that Naftali was there, he was doing nothing but laughing.
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