‘I don’t know. It’s . . . I think they have it easier.’
‘Christine!’
The basso continuo broke off. ‘Yes, Herr Meijer?’
‘Do women have it easier than men?’
When Christine laughed, and she had a roaring, masculine laugh, she always kept a hand in front of her mouth, like a boxer feeling for a tooth that’s just been knocked out. When she had a carp to kill for Shabbos, she didn’t hit it on the head with a tenderising hammer, but stuck her wide thumb in its mouth and broke its neck with a jerk.
‘You’re a funny one, Herr Meijer,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘We women do all the work.’
‘That might be an argument against your thesis,’ said Uncle Salomon. Arthur was flattered that he used such adult words.
‘But girls don’t need to have bar mitzvahs!’
At the bar mitzvah, the day when one becomes an adult in the middle of childhood, one has to deliver the sidra in the service, the Torah passage of the week, you have to learn it by heart, word for word and note for note, you have to stand up in front of the whole congregation as a singer, torture for someone who almost dies of embarrassment when he has, by way of punishment, to stand up in front of the class at school and recite Schiller’s ‘Veiled Image at Sais’, in a quivering voice, every single verse. And then, if your voice assumes a life of its own, if it suddenly, without any advance warning, starts squeaking or growling . . .
‘All our voices have broken,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘And we still survived our bar mitzvahs.’
‘Yes, fine,’ said Arthur, ‘but Shmul . . .’ Shmul, whose big day he could still remember – there had been a whole table of cakes and a drop of wine, very sweet and warm – Shmul had trilled like a little bird in the prayer room, and Janki had been very proud of him, but that was it, Shmul was Shmul and Arthur was Arthur, and in his case, he was sure of it, the whole dreadful disaster would come about, the one they whispered about in cheder behind their raised copies of the chumash, his voice would finally break, on that precise day, at that very minute, he wouldn’t be able to make a sound, not even a wrong one, he would just stand there and croak, and everyone would stare at him and shake their heads. Only Cantor Würzburger, with whom he had been studying this passage twice a week for months, would nod and say in his high, German voice, ‘I always knew the boy would make me look a fool.’
And then there was the address, as well, the droosh that one had to deliver at major feasts, the learned speech that the listeners knew better than the speaker did, because Cantor Würzburger, who also rehearsed this part of the ritual, had only three addresses in his repertoire, which he drilled into his bar mitzvah boys in turn. Arthur had been landed with the one about those commandments which are time-bound, and from which women are therefore exempt, and he was sure – how could it be otherwise? – that he would falter or dry up, he simply wouldn’t know how to go on, so that Chanele would lower her head, very slowly, as she did when she was really furious. And Janki would . . .
‘You left out shitting your pants during the droosh,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘That would be even worse, and it isn’t going to happen either. If bar mitzvahs were really as hard as you think, the Jewish people would have died out long ago.’
‘But . . .’ said Arthur.
‘You talk too much,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘In the old days, if someone had offered me a cow and gone on the way you’re doing, I wouldn’t have bought it.’ He licked his spoon clean, thoroughly and carefully, and then asked in a much quieter voice than before: ‘Tell me, dear boy, what it is that you really want to say. Why would you like to be a girl?’
Arthur blushed. That happened to him often, the heat simply rose up within him and there was nothing he could do about it. He cast an anxious glance at Christine, but she had disappeared behind her veil of steam and was stirring her soup-pot with the concentration of an alchemist.
‘My face is so ugly,’ Arthur, feeling his eyes growing moist. ‘If I had long hair, people wouldn’t see it as much.’
Uncle Salomon didn’t laugh at him. Neither did he say, ‘You aren’t ugly, mon joujou,’ as Aunt Mimi would have done. He said nothing at all, just rested his big, heavy cattle-trader hands on Arthur’s head and very slowly and searchingly felt its contours, ran one hand over the back of his head and the other over his nose, pinched his cheeks and tapped his teeth inquiringly with his fingernails. His fingers, with their rough tips, smelt reassuringly of snuff. In the end he wiped his hands on his frock coat, a gesture that he had acquired over many visits to cow-byres. Arthur waited for his judgement, like a seriously ill patient after a thorough examination, waiting for the diagnosis of the specialist.
‘Nu,’ said Uncle Salomon.
Arthur lowered his head. But two strong fingers gripped him under his chin and forced him to look up. Uncle Salomon puffed out his cheeks, lips closed. Where they weren’t covered by his white whiskers, his many burst veins looked like colourful hundreds and thousands sprinkled on a cake.
‘There is only one solution for your problem,’ said Uncle Salomon. ‘You will have to grow a beard.’
Arthur stared at him
‘Not straight away, of course. Life has its rules. First come the pimples, then the beard. Shall I let you into a secret?’ He tugged around at his own beard until the yellowish white strands pointed in all directions. ‘I didn’t like my looks when I was a boy either. In my case it was my hair, which I lost far too early. They called me “the galekh”. But whether it’s your hair or your face – no one likes themselves. Apart from stupid people. They like themselves a lot. So.’ He rubbed his hands as if he were washing them without water. ‘Now your parents can come home. I’m hungry.’
‘But you won’t say anything to them. Please.’
‘About what?’
‘What I told you.’
‘You know,’ Uncle Salomon said, with a lot of wrinkles around his eyes, ‘I’m sometimes so lost in my own thoughts that I don’t even hear what’s being said to me. I’ve been working something out all the time. The difference between boys and girls. Are you interested in it?’ He picked up his spoon like a pointer and began to pontificate. ‘Son is ben, and has the numerical value of fifty-two. Daughter is bat – four hundred and two. A difference of three hundred and fifty. Does that mean that daughters are worth that much more than sons?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Arthur quietly.
‘Wrong. Three hundred and fifty is, in fact, the numerical value of the word pera. And what does pera mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Pera means long hair! Like that grown by someone who has made a vow.’ Salomon held the palm of his hand out to Arthur and made him shake hands as if concluding the purchase of a cow. ‘So a girl, we can see from the gematria, is nothing more than a boy who has decided to stop cutting his hair. But if you add two hundred and fifty and four hundred and two . . .’
‘What sort of maassehs are you telling the boy?’ A maasseh is just a story, but the way Janki pronounced the word, it meant more than that: a stupid story, a superfluous story, a story that wastes valuable time, time that a little boy would be better off using to do his homework or learn his bar mitzvah address, so that he didn’t make a fool of himself with it.
Janki hadn’t come all the way into the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway, with the face of a Sunday walker whose path has led him around the edge of a bog, and who fears for his clean shoes. His light grey coat was cut quite generously, the way artists in Paris liked them at the moment. He held his hat in his hand, along with the lion-headed walking stick.
‘Why don’t you tell me when you’re coming? So that we can at least send a carriage for you. What does it look like when you march down the main road on foot like a . . . like a . . .’
‘Like a beheimes dealer, you mean? Nu, there are worse things.’ Salomon rose from his chair and bent for the umbrella that had been lying at his foot the whole time like a faithful dog. His body looked smaller than
before, bulky and less powerful. Golde’s death had given the whole man a good shake and let him collapse in on himself.
‘And why are you sitting in the kitchen and not in the drawing-room?’
‘Because of Christine, of course,’ said Salomon and winked at Arthur, as men do to one another. ‘I’ve never been able to resist beautiful women.’
The fat cook, embarrassed, laughed her gurgling boxer’s laugh.
‘You shouldn’t keep her from her work. Certainly not today, when we have guests.’
‘I can go again,’ said Salomon. ‘It isn’t all that far to Endingen anyway.’
‘You know I wouldn’t allow that.’
Arthur, who had a keen sense for things unsaid, looked anxiously back and forth between his father and Uncle Salomon.
‘Of course you must stay,’ said Janki. ‘Although in fact today . . .’
‘Important visitors?’
‘A few business colleagues. Nothing special. Just a sandwich.’
‘For which I’ve spent three days standing at the stove,’ Christine grumbled into her soup pot.
‘“Guest” is an interesting word, by the way,’ said Salomon. ‘In Hebrew it has the numerical value of two hundred and fifteen, exactly the same amount as . . .’
‘Not now. Please.’ Janki had great trouble keeping the polite smile on his face. ‘I have a lot of preparation to do. And you need to . . .’
‘What?’
‘You aren’t going to sit down at our table like that, are you?’
Salomon gripped the flaps of his old-fashioned frock coat and turned once in a circle on tripping footsteps. ‘This is as handsome as I get,’ he said.
‘I’ll fetch you a new shirt from the shop.’ Janki had come into the kitchen after all. ‘To what do we owe the honour of this visit, in fact?’
‘I nearly forgot,’ said Salomon. ‘I’ve brought a letter. For Chanele.’
16
She must have run home five or ten times in the course of the day to give Christine one final instruction for the kitchen, and then one very last one; to be sure that Louisli, the inexperienced new serving girl, didn’t try to polish the precious silver knives with scouring powder, as had actually happened in Mimi’s Zurich house; to put out the big damask tablecloth for the two hired servants who helped out at all the big dinners in Baden, and entrust them with the key to the porcelain cupboard; to check this and correct that, because the formal events that Janki organised twice a year for his goyish business associates were battles that you could only fight successfully if you took into account every eventuality and every possible setback from the outset, and had prepared the correct strategy in advance. During the battle itself, once the guests had arrived, one had to be able to direct one’s troops from the general’s hillock at the end of the table with nothing more than the twitch of a finger and a nod of the head, and at the same time smile without meaning it, chat without saying anything and stress repeatedly that you hadn’t gone to any trouble, and that what you were serving up was little more than a round of sandwiches.
If it had been possible, Chanele would have crossed these evenings out of the diary once and for all, not because they caused her too much trouble, but because she thought they were pointless, the mimicked ritual of a society to which one would never fully belong. It was a disguise, a masquerade that even involved her kitchen, because Chanele’s house was of course run on kosher lines, and given that there was a prohibition on mixing meat and milk, one had to summon up a lot of imagination to find something appropriate to go with the butter sauces customary on such occasions.
She had run home at least ten times – luckily they only lived opposite, and only had to cross the little square between the Weite and the Mittlere Gasse – and ten times she had hurried back to the shop. To their shop, even though Janki’s name was over the door in gold letters, Propriétaire Jean Meijer, and even though Herr Ziltener, the accountant, only ever said about any decision that affected them, ‘I will suggest that to the boss.’ But where everything else was concerned, Ziltener was anxiously meticulous, down to the tiniest detail; satirically minded commentators even said that he read his punctual ‘good morning’ from the paper frills that he wore to protect his sleeves. For all other colleagues there was no doubt who was really in charge at the Modern Drapery: Madame Meijer, and no one else.
Madame Meijer liked to be the last one left in the shop in the evening. She needed those undisturbed moments, she needed them more than ever. Chanele loved to stroll around the deserted sales rooms with the blouses laid neatly in piles, and shelves full of ribbons and haberdashery, here nudging a lady’s hat on its wooden stand to exactly the right angle, there putting a forgotten tape measure back in its correct place behind the counter. She enjoyed those secret minutes, the only ones in the day that belonged to her alone, a young girl behind the bolted door, opening the trousseau for the hundredth time, counting the bedclothes and running her hand over the cambric undershirts. She had even ordered, or had Ziltener suggest to the boss, that the gas lamps were only ever to be turned off two hours after the close of business, a form of advertising, she had said by way of explanation, to signal to the customers that people in the shop went on working for them until late at night. You had to know how to deal with Janki.
Of course everyone in the company knew about that little foible the boss’s wife had, and anyone who had to work longer at the shop, perhaps because a curtain ordered for the following day had to be stitched in a hurry, or a delivery that had arrived late had to be unpacked, stayed in the workshop or the store-room, kept the door shut, and wouldn’t have dared to disturb Madame Meijer on her rounds.
Madame Meijer . . .
Chanele hadn’t slipped into the new role on the day of her wedding. When someone is recruited to the military, you can dress him up on the spot, but under his uniform he is still a civilian at first. Inner feeling chases after outward circumstances, and we have all seen examples when the two never catch up. During the initial phase of her marriage Chanele had behaved as if she had merely switched servitudes, from one Meijer house to another. She ran her household quietly and inconspicuously, and even right at the start, when there was no question of hiring a servant, there was never a pan left unscoured nor an oven door covered with soot. Chanele cooked, she baked, and then when she came to her husband’s table – still the old table, which Janki had had brought from Guebwiller, not the long, new one at which he would now entertain his guests – when she finally sat down, wherever she sat became the bottom of the table. Janki soon became used to issuing the mute commands that he had observed at Salomon’s house in Endingen, reached his hand out without a word when he wanted to have a plate passed to him, or, when he came into the house, simply dropped his coat on the floor when he came into the house. But what for the old Meijers had been a wordless interplay, more an intertwining of forces than a sequence of orders given and obeyed, was slightly off in the young couple, like a wheel set not quite precisely on its hub. However, Chanele never seemed to be bothered by Janki’s high-handed behaviour; at least she never rebelled against it.
She had also started to help out in the French Drapery Store again; it was as if she had never been away. She smiled politely and made tea, took the customers’ coats off when they came in and handed them their hatpins before they left, wore the brown dress with the cambric trim and never contradicted when her husband went on calling her Mademoiselle Hanna in front of the customers. He also used that name, incidentally, when they were on their own, he whispered it into her body in bed, and although she generally responded to his attentions more or less dutifully, as she would have swept a cabinet-maker’s workshop or harnessed a coachman’s horses, during those moments she felt something like the memory of a feeling, a tone of thought that goes on vibrating after you wake up, even though you have long since forgotten the dream that goes with it.
All in all the young Chanele, even more severely trained by the awareness of her dependency than by
the model set by Golde, was a blameless wife. At the ‘Eshet chayil mi yimtza’ Janki could have smiled at her, as Salomon always smiled at Golde, but he repeated the old words – and even that only for the first few years – without meaning them. Only on one single point did Chanele refuse to obey her husband from the outset. However much he tried to persuade her, whether he tried flattery or argued the duty of keeping up appearances, which she now had to perform by his side: never again did she pluck her eyebrows. The dark line across her face remained, and the more she became Madame Meijer, the less imaginable she was without it.
Chanele’s transformation, if one wished to give a starting point to this slow process, began with the opening of the Modern Emporium at the House of the Red Sign, or in fact with a conversation that she had with Golde shortly before it opened. Old Frau Meijer – that was what she called herself, and she was proud of her mother-in-law title – hadn’t come to Baden because of Janki and Chanele that time, but to take the train to see Mimi in Zurich. However, she had found time to be shown around the still unfinished sales rooms by Chanele. She had stopped in front of a mirror newly fixed to the wall, sucked her lower lip deep into her mouth and thoughtfully considered herself and Chanele.
‘You need different clothes,’ Golde said at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re dressed like an employee. And you’re the owner.’
‘I am?’
‘The shop’s being set up with your nedinye.’
‘But that doesn’t make me the boss,’ said Chanele and Golde laughed.
‘Of course not. You must let your husband have his head. But who is the brains in that head?’ She beckoned Chanele over with a bent index finger as if to whisper a secret in her ear, but just looked at her and spread her arms, as one does to emphasise the irrefutable conclusion of a long argument. ‘Nu?’ she said, and the impersonation was so perfect that Chanele couldn’t help laughing out loud.
Melnitz Page 18
