Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  In the kitchen Christine had everything under control. She said it with the gritted smile of a boxer who doesn’t want to show any weakness just before the victorious conclusion of a fight. The covered bowls and plates waited on the table like heavy artillery awaiting deployment in battle. Only one small gap was not occupied, just big enough for the two hired servants to act as food tasters for the party. They had hung their threadbare dinner jackets over the backs of the chairs and rolled up their sleeves, and when Madame Meijer came in they just lifted their bottoms an inch out of their chairs and greeted her with their mouths full.

  And Chanele still couldn’t talk to Shmul. She was already on the way to his room, but Janki was already coming towards her and cried in a despairing voice, ‘You’re not even dressed.’

  So she dressed herself up, decorated herself as she had decorated the table in the dining room. Arthur was allowed to button up her dress; that privilege had been part of Chanele’s promises, because Arthur loved nothing more than to be allowed to stand in his parents’ bedroom, which was otherwise forbidden to him, Marco Polo in an exotic palace, and carefully finger all the little hooks into their eyes. As he was short-sighted, his head almost touched his mother’s back, he was allowed to be quite close to her and inhale her very special scent of cleanliness, talcum powder and dependability, before he was dispatched to have his hair combed once more by Louisli.

  Since Chanele thought vanity was only ever a waste of time, the rest of the preparations took a very short time; she put on her jewellery as one might hang a bunch of keys on a hook, and where her hair was concerned – well, there is one advantage to the Jewish tradition of wearing a sheitel: you can put your new hairstyle on like a hat.

  When she came into the drawing-room, the whole family was already there waiting. Janki looked very elegant in the full glory of an evening suit. He had pinned the Lavallière over his silver brocade waistcoat with an artful carelessness that must have taken a dozen tries. Shmul, whom she now had to spend an evening calling François, wore a velvet jacket that set off his narrow hips. The freshly waxed tips of his moustache stuck into the air like little knives, and he looked so elegant, in a bored way, that it was easy to imagine what young salesgirls found irresistible about him. Arthur, with a very unhappy face, waited beside his brother. Uncle Salomon had rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Shmul,’ said Chanele, ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mama, I will act quite convincingly as if I’m enjoying the evening.’

  ‘Frau Lutz came to see me today, Mathilde Lutz, and she told me . . .’

  But the first guests were already being ushered in, and Chanele had to stop talking and put on her Mademoiselle-Hanna smile.

  The first, as always were of course the accountant Ziltener and his wife. Ziltener, devoted to letters and numbers, had, in spite of all kinds of discreet hints, never been able to understand that etiquette required him to appear only ten minutes after the given time, ‘to give the wife of the house the opportunity to carry out the last preparations’, as it said in the books of manners. In his worn, dark suit and stiff collar he felt visibly ill at ease, and when he bent over his boss’s hand like a folding ruler, she could see how carefully he had combed his thin hair over his bald patch. A sweetish smell of curd soap and mothballs rose from the back of his neck.

  Unaccustomed to dealing with children, he was about to ruffle Arthur’s hair, but then shied away from the contact at the last moment. His outstretched hand hung in the air as if he were about to bless the boy.

  His wife, taller and bonier than he, came from a farming village near Lucerne, and didn’t contribute a single word to the conversation. Ziltener had probably forbidden her to say anything apart from ‘Good evening’ and ‘Thank you for the invitation.’ They had both been invited only out of kindness, and were abandoned by Janki mid-greeting, when one of the two hired servants brought in the new guests.

  Director Strähle, the owner of the Verenahof, had the engaging, eloquent manners of a hotelier who is used to saying exactly what the guest wants to hear. His voice, full of ostentatious cordiality, flowed from him as if freshly blended with oil, and seemed made for much larger spaces than the Meijers’ drawing room. On the breast of his shirt, which swelled like the bow of a ship, there shone silver buttons with the coat of arms that he had had designed specially for his hotel.

  Frau Strähle was German, and people in Baden said she had, when she had fallen in love with the attractive director of her hotel during a spa cure, abandoned an extremely advantageous engagement in favour of her new union. Another rumour claimed that she had a different dress for every day of the season, all paid for from the tills of the Verenahof. Tody she was wearing a model in lime-green taffeta, which billowed with the suggestion of a bridal train each time she took a step.

  Director Strähle kissed Chanele’s hand, chatted to François, joked with Arthur, and could not get over the pleasant surprise of finding the honoured Herr Meijer senior here too. He had – and this too was part of the rituals of these invitations – brought an outsized bottle of champagne, the special cuvée of the Verenahof, as he stressed several times, and very popular among his guests. Life, he added, was in the end too short, hahaha, only ever to drink water.

  ‘I didn’t knew you could drink water.’ Herr Rauhut, the editor of the Badener Tageblatt, liked to make little jokes about his own love of a decent drop of wine, and thus tried to gloss over the fact that he was generally drunk or at least slightly the worse for wear. He had come alone, and Chanele was already worrying that he had come without his wife and the seating arrangements would have to be changed all over again. But then Frau Rauhut was there after all, a sickly, reproachfully wheezing person with a bluish complexion. When her husband, as he inevitably tended to do after a few glasses, favoured the party with Schubert’s Lieder – he had a powerful if not very tuneful voice – his wife had to accompany him on the piano, and every time she did one wondered if she really had enough strength to press down the keys.

  The editor drew the hotel manager into a corner and began to talk at him in a whisper. Chanele observed them keenly to see if they were casting secret glances at Shmul, but they seemed to be talking about something else. The conversation fell quickly silent again, because the arrival of the Schneggs was announced. The Schneggs were, if there could be such a thing in democratic Switzerland, almost aristocrats, admittedly without a title, but surrounded by the almost equally elegant aura of old money. Herr Laurenz Schnegg was the biggest property-owner in town; the House with the Red Shield, in which the Modern Emporium was installed, belonged to him. He and his wife were dressed in a deliberately old-fashioned style, as if to demonstrate that they didn’t need to adapt to the fashions or trends of the day. As they were welcomed into the house, Herr Schnegg held out his hand as devotedly to Chanele as if he expected that, in a reversal of the traditional roles of the sexes, she might kiss his; Frau Schnegg, with pursed lips and pointed chin, looked past her hostess and indicated to everyone that it was actually beneath her dignity to mingle with such society. She paid not the slightest attention to old Salomon Meijer.

  Last of all, full of apologies and explanations, came Councillor Bugmann. Rauhut immediately wound himself around him as a loyal dog might his master, because alongside his many offices the councillor also had a seat on the board of the Tagblatt. A committee meeting had detained him for so long, and then there had been a case at his lawyer’s office, a stupid story, a young man, in need of financial support, whose official guardian he was, had suddenly taken it into his head to get married, without a rappen in his pocket, and when he, Bugmann, had refused his consent, had had to refuse on the grounds of his responsible position, the young man had made a scene, indescribable, and used words that one really couldn’t repeat in the presence of ladies – in short, it had taken a lot of time. He was sorry, really very sorry, to turn up late for such pleasant company, but he was sure Monsieur Meijer, as an equally
busy man of the world, would have some understanding of the fact that the day sometimes needed to have twenty-five hours or even more. ‘You just mustn’t accept every honour offered to you,’ his wife always said. Bugmann shrugged. It was a debate that the two of them had every day.

  The councillor was a red-faced man of the apoplectic type. With his frock coat he wore an ascot of a grey material interwoven with metallic threads. Not really good quality, thought Janki as he assured his guest how honoured he felt that a man in such demand had even found the time in his busy calendar to accept his invitation to a modest sandwich dinner.

  This was the prompt for Louisli, who, after a discreet nod from Chanele, shyly announced that dinner was served.

  The meal passed without incident. Arthur didn’t drop his cutlery and didn’t knock a glass over, and as, out of fear of doing something wrong, he only ate tiny portions, he won general praise for his well-behaved restraint. Salomon discovered that he shared with Councillor Bugmann, most of whose voters came from rural communities, an interest in cattle breeding. François was charming, talked with Frau Strähle about jewellery and with Frau Rauhut about music, and even managed to make Frau Schnegg nearly smile once or twice. Janki leaned far across the table and discussed business matters with Herr Schnegg. Ziltener remained submissively silent. The hired servants performed their duties. Herr Rauhut drank.

  The food was a great success as well. Christine had already outdone herself with the salmon mayonnaise; when the chicken soup with dumplings arrived Director Strähle swore that he would absolutely have to send his cook for the recipe, and the veal cutlets were prepared with so much goose-fat that no one missed the butter sauce. They washed it down with excellent wines, a Gewürztraminer from Alsace with the fish, and then a heavy Burgundy that Janki had ordered specially from the Lévy cellar in Metz.

  ‘I have one question,’ said the editor, articulating each word with drunken concentration. ‘Only one question, Herr Meijer. Tell me now, what is kosher about this wine?’

  ‘That I hope it’s going down particularly well,’ Janki said evasively, waving to one of the hired waiters to refill Herr Rauhut’s glass.

  But the editor would not be distracted. ‘No,’ he insisted, ‘I want to know now. A grape like that isn’t slaughtered through shechita, at least not in these parts . . .’

  ‘Hahaha, shechita, very good!’ As a hotel manager, Director Strähle had become used to laughing uproariously at every joke uttered within his hearing.

  ‘. . . and if it isn’t slaughtered by shechita, what can be kosher about it? Or not kosher?’

  ‘Our laws are sometimes very complicated.’

  ‘Which laws are not?’ Councillor Bugmann nodded knowingly. ‘Only last week I had a case in my office . . .’

  ‘One moment!’ the editor cut in. His wife coughed anxiously. ‘I haven’t finished yet! We press men, the fourth estate, so to speak, want to have our questions answered. Now: what is kosher about this wine?’

  There are things that cannot be explained without rudeness. A wine is kosher when it is produced by a Jew, and treyf when it is not. But how can one explain that to a drunken goy without insulting him?

  It was Salomon who saved the situation, and saved it, indeed, with a gematria. And Janki had expressly asked him not to bother anyone with his chochmes.

  ‘Listen, Herr Rauhut,’ he said. ‘Let me explain something to you about this matter. Wine, the Hebrew word for wine, of course, has a numerical value of seventy-five.’

  ‘Numerical value?’

  ‘According to our tradition, each letter corresponds to a number. So “the wine” has a value of seventy-five. And do you know what word has exactly the same value? Ganavcha, your thief.’

  Rauhut looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  ‘And what is that trying to teach us? That wine is your thief. And what is it stealing from you? Your intelligence and your manners.’

  ‘Hahaha,’ laughed Director Strähle. ‘Very good. I’ll have to remember that.’

  When even Herr Schnegg nodded appreciatively, the others even joined in the laughter. No one likes drunken guests who disturb the polite insignificance of dinner-table conversations.

  Herr Rauhut was so busy thinking about the problem of numerical values and thieves that he completely forgot his original question. He emptied his glass in one go and held it out to the hired servant to be refilled. ‘But it’s good, this kosher wine of yours,’ he said, too loudly. His wife coughed.

  Apart from that small event, the dinner went as perfectly as Janki had wished. No one noticed that Chanele spoke little, and kept looking anxiously across at her oldest son.

  The evening would also have ended perfectly. But then the ladies withdrew to the drawing-room, Arthur said goodnight to everyone and disappeared with great relief to his room, the hired servants cleared the table and cashed up their tips. Then the gentlemen filled their brandy glasses and after thorough ritual sniffing and turning-around-in-the-fingers they lit the cigars that Janki handed around. Except François, who smoked a Russian cigarette in his almost real amber holder, and Salomon, who played in his pocket with his tobacco tin, because Janki had forbidden him to take snuff on the grounds that it was too rustic.

  Then, inevitably, they turned to politics.

  18

  ‘What would interest me,’ Councillor Bugmann said, opening the two bottom buttons of waistcoat with a groan of pleasure, ‘what would even interest me very much, Monsieur Meijer: what do you actually think in puncto puncti of the popular initiative on which we will all be voting this summer?’

  ‘An entirely superfluous innovation.’ Herr Schnegg pulled a face as if someone had tipped vinegar into his brandy. ‘Popular initiative! Even just the word! Making laws by collecting signatures from the rabble for any old ideas! What do we have a government for?’

  That is pro . . . prog . . . progress.’ It took Editor Rauhut three goes to clamber over all the consonantal hurdles, which didn’t stop him from attempting another verbal mountain range. ‘The further elaboration of the democratic rights of the . . . of the people.’

  ‘The rabble,’ Herr Schnegg repeated. Director Strähle rubbed earnestly at a non-existent stain on his shirt front. As a hotel manager he made it a principle never to involve himself in political discussions.

  ‘I don’t mean the popular initiative per se. This instrument of the decision-making process has been introduced, and we will have to live with it, nolens volens.’ If his wife had been there, she would have known by these sentences that Bugmann too had had a great deal to drink. Where he was concerned, this always found expression in the Latin phrases of his student days floating to the surface. ‘I mean the concrete case on which the people will have to vote in August. Article 25 bis.’

  Salomon Meijer leaned forward and rested his hands on the table as if he were about to stand up. He began to drum very gently with his fingers, a musician who hadn’t quite made up his mind which key was suitable for a particular occasion.

  ‘25 bis,’ Bugmann repeated with an expressive gesture, as if he wanted to write the paragraph in the air with the glowing tip of his cigar. ‘A complement to the state constitution which might be of special interest to our host, who has entertained us so handsomely today. Please, Monsieur Meijer, tell us your opinion on the matter!’

  This challenge was very unwelcome to Janki. He organised these ‘goyish evenings’ precisely to demonstrate, through natural social intercourse, that he had been accepted here in the town as an equal among equals, and that such important people as Herr Schnegg or Herr Bugmann simply saw him as the successful businessman, one of their own, or at least no longer primarily as a Jew. To this end he was prepared to listen to Director Strähle’s genial boasts, let Herr Rauhut drink expensive cognac like water and talk happily about any subject they wanted to. Almost any subject. But why did Bugmann have to start on about this wretched people’s initiative which, under cover of animal-protection legislation, sought to add an anti-Se
mitic article to the federal constitution and forbid the slaughtering of animals according to the Jewish rite?

  ‘I have no opinion on the matter,’ he said, attempting to evade the issue. ‘After all, I am still a guest in this beautiful country. As a citizen of France . . .’

  ‘Quo usque tandem?’ Bugmann interrupted. ‘How long do you plan to wait before you become one of us in terms of your papers as well? I have told you often enough before, Monsieur Meijer: people like you, people who promote our economy, are most welcome in the citizens’ register. For myself, I would always be willing . . .’

  ‘Citizens’ register,’ said Rauhut, drawing all the syllables together into a single one, ‘such a word does not exist.’ He nodded with satisfaction a number of time, as if he had just solved a big problem.

  ‘We like being French, Herr Councillor.’ François smiled so politely that his contradiction seemed like a compliment. ‘In France égalité is just a word. A Captain Dreyfus has just been appointed to the General Staff. That same Dreyfus family also exists in Endingen. Do you think one of them could enjoy a similar career?’

  ‘In principle, yes.’

  ‘In principle perhaps, Herr Councillor,’ said François, again with his friendly smile. ‘But not in the Aargau.’

  ‘Another drop of cognac?’ Janki swiftly intervened. But only Rauhut held out his glass.

  ‘Whether you be Swiss or French,’ Bugmann insisted, ‘you must have an opinion on the matter. You as a Jew . . .’

  An old voice began to giggle. Uncle Melnitz was suddenly crouching with them at the table, right beside Janki. With his bony fingers, on which the skin sat loosely like an oversized glove, he had gripped a cigar and was bringing it to his wrinkled mouth. ‘Come on, Janki!’ he said, and with every word smoke rose up between his teeth as if a fire raged deep within him. ‘Come on! Tell him your opinion. You as a Jew. Yes. Or did you think that ludicrous tie would make you an honorary goy?’