Today there were a lot of untypical guests in the Palm Garden, noisy, often colourful figures, ‘not really elegant people’, as Mimi established after a glance at the frayed collars and hats that hadn’t been brushed for ages. Around their tables, on which pamphlets were stacked, the chairs were crammed so close together that the heavily laden waiters could hardly make their way through. Some of the men hadn’t even sat down, but, bottles and glasses in hand, were getting in the way, gesticulating and talking at one another.
‘Those are the socialists,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée. After his own arrangement of popular folk tunes and the concluding ‘Circassian Tattoo’, he had joined Frau Pomeranz and her guest at their table, and had greeted them both by kissing their hand, once again prompting Hinda to burst out laughing. When he was conducting on the platform, the conductor looked like a figure from a musical box, all tiny, regular and finely turned out. Seen from close to he was just a little man with a big nose, not the curved, Levantine kind that people like to ascribe to Jews, but swollen through illness and purple in colour, a defect that Monsieur Fleur-Valléee attempted to conceal with a lot of powder. Consequently the lapels of the tailcoat that he wore as a work uniform always bore a white dusting.
‘The socialists,’ he repeated, pulling a face as if a trumpeter had parped in the middle of one of his finest pianissimo passages. ‘They are holding their world congress here in the Tonhalle. It’s been going on for three days. People without any feeling for music. They even go on talking during “Åses Tod”, and that’s really almost like Kol Nidre.’
As if to confirm his words, at that moment the discussion at the crammed-together tables rose to a dissonant crescendo. ‘They’ll come to blows again,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘Where do these people come from?’ Mimi asked.
‘From Germany,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée, drawing a loop in the air with his index and middle fingers pressed together each time he named a country, as if conducting a map. ‘From Austria-Hungary. From France. From England. From Italy. From Russia. From Poland. And from America, I assume.’
‘You do seem to know a lot about these socialists,’ said Mimi, threatening him with her finger, a saucy gesture that she had copied from the soubrette in the municipal theatre.
‘I have established it through music,’ said the little conductor, rising on tiptoe as if pride at his own cleverness had made him taller. ‘By means of a little exercise from my days as first violinist with the spa orchestra in Bad Kissingen. A pot-pourri of national anthems, performed in the style of Rossini, all very light and scherzando, but with very daring transitions. Do you play the piano at all?’ he asked Hinda without transition.
‘Sadly not.’
‘That’s lucky, believe me. Very lucky! Stay that way! It’s better not to play an instrument than to do it in a dilettante manner. So many times have I had to accompany so-called music lovers at parties. Lovers, heavens above!’ He threw his hand to his face in dramatic despair. It looked as if he was trying to hide his swollen nose. ‘But what was I about to . . .? The national anthems, of course. Listen.’ Still standing by the table, he leaned down to the two women, like a waiter taking an order, and slowly began to sing the Austrian Kaiser anthem. ‘“Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze unsern Kaiser, unser Land, mächtig durch des Glaubens Stütze führt er uns mit weiser Hand! Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive.” A daring transition, don’t you think?’
‘And what does that have to do with the socialists?’ Hinda asked.
‘A little game that we used to pass the time in Bad Kissingen. You’re not really artistically stretched in a spa orchestra of that kind. Before we played the pot-pourri, we always bet on the individual countries. We looked at the people in the audience and tried to guess where they came from.’
‘And then . . .?’
‘The fact is that people applaud when their national anthem is played. I don’t know why; they just do. At least on this point the socialist comrades seem to be exactly as patriotic as everyone else.’
Because they all turned their heads at that moment – pointlessly, because if people don’t actually happen to be swinging flags, you can’t see their patriotism – so because at that moment they were looking over at the tables of the congress participants, they were able to see quite precisely what was happening there, and what would even appear in the newspaper the following day under the title ‘Riot in the Palm Garden’.
They didn’t catch the words of the discussion, they had no idea what it was about, but one of the men involved must have said something that so enraged his listeners that they no longer knew how to reply with arguments, resorting instead to brandished beer glasses. The result was that in the middle of the archipelago of crammed-together tables a volcano seemed to be erupting. A surge of chairs, cutlery, fluttering pamphlets and flying hats poured in all directions, and in its midst, fish washed on to the shore by the storm, fighting men thrashed around, fists flailing, even as they fell.
It all happened so quickly that Mimi and Hinda didn’t even have time to be really frightened. They hadn’t had time to explain the sudden flurry of excitement, when a young man, pushed by another, crashed backwards into their table and knocked it over. The cups of hot chocolate and the plates of cream slices went flying through the air as if slung from a catapult. The man himself, as he stumbled, landed half in Hinda’s lap, and nearly dragged her from her chair.
Hinda heard Mimi screaming beside her, a long, high note like the one blown by a tekiyoh on a shofar, except that it wasn’t in fact Mimi, it was Monsieur Fleur-Vallée.
The strange man slipped very slowly from her knees to the floor, tried to cling on to something, reaching blindly into the air, grabbed the sleeve of Hinda’s dress, pulled himself up by it and, as he did so, tore the sleeve from its stitches, with a noise which to Mimi, who had by now recovered from her shock, sounded like a shot from a cannon.
The man struggled to his feet, smiled at Hinda with big, white teeth, as if the whole thing had been only a harmlessly amusing diversion, said something incomprehensible in a foreign language and hurled himself back into the fray. Hinda tried to watch after him, but the churning floods of humanity had immediately swallowed him again.
The whole thing lasted only a few minutes. Tempers cooled as quickly as they had flared. The men brushed the dust from each other’s suits, lost hats were sorted, undented and put back on, toppled plant tubs were set back up again. The injured were carried out on table-tops, the legs having probably served as clubs. When at last two policemen, as quickly as their official dignity allowed, came into the Palm Garden, the previously so disputatious conference participants were already calmly helping the waiters clean up.
Monsieur Fleur-Vallée took considerably longer to calm down. He was a sensitive artist, after all, as Frau Pomeranz would surely confirm, and not made for excitements of this kind. But more than his own wellbeing, it had been concern for Hinda that had led him to pass the remark, and it was his most fervent hope that the young lady had not been hurt in any way, and that she had soon recovered from her unpleasant experience.
He had to ask his worried question twice before Hinda heard him. Lost in thought, she was observing two delegates as they picked up scattered pamphlets. Neither was the man who had collided with her so roughly. Perhaps he had been one of the injured men.
‘At least put your cape on!’ said Aunt Mimi. What will people think if they see you in your torn dress like a gypsy?’
She actually wanted to go home straight away, but the landlord of the Palm Garden, who was rushing from table to table to apologise in person to his regular guests for all the unpleasantness, insisted that they first be served another hot chocolate, with cream slices, on the house, of course.
‘Well, all right,’ said Mimi, ‘the refreshment might do us good after all that excitement.’
‘As you wish,’ said Hinda, who hadn’t been listening.
Monsieur Fleur-Vallée was still quite pale, and Mimi insisted that he join them and also have a hot chocolate, on the house.
The socialists, as if nothing had happened, were already sitting back at their tables talking. Mimi looked on, with respectable disapproval.
‘Such people shouldn’t even be allowed in the country,’ she said. ‘He could have broken all your bones, Hinda.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He could have crippled you.’
‘He didn’t do it on purpose. And nothing really happened.’
‘He tore your dress. Is that nothing? Well, if you ask me, it doesn’t matter very much anyway, it’s hardly the latest fashion, but still . . . What is the world coming to?’
‘Still, he did apologise,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée.
‘Did you understand what he said?’
‘Did you not, Frau Pomeranz?’
‘Can I speak Russian or Polish or whatever it was?’
‘It wasn’t Russian,’ said the conductor, and rubbed his hands together in a know-it-all manner, spraying powder all over the place. ‘And it wasn’t Polish.’
‘So what was it?’
‘Yiddish,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée.
‘Seid mir moichel,’ the man had said, ‘Forgive me.’ He had spoken not the Yiddish that was customary hereabouts, but the Eastern European variant that served the Jews as a lingua franca from the Baltic down to Bessarabia. There were many Jews from different countries among the delegates at the socialist congress, said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée, which was hardly a surprise, after all, Karl Marx, who had invented the whole thing, if you liked, had himself not been a goy.
‘Herr Blumental’, Mimi displayed her newly acquired knowledge later over dinner, ‘has even met Karl Marx’s daughter in person. She is an interpreter at the congress. And August Bebel, the top socialist, has a son-in-law in Zurich. A doctor. And you, Pinchas? Did you even know that there was such a congress here?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Pinchas, ‘I kind of suspected as much. Because of all the articles that have been appearing in all the newspapers for weeks.’
‘As a housewife one has no time to sit around for half the day reading newspapers.’
‘Of course not, my dear,’ said Pinchas, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of irony in his voice. He loved his wife as she was, and happily allowed her all her superficiality and little vanities, although without ignoring them. He didn’t disapprove of her spending too much money on clothes. After more than two decades Pinchas still felt it was his greatest good fortune that Mimi had married him and not Janki; sometimes when he thought of her, he had to interrupt his work for a few seconds and just stand still and rejoice.
Pinchas had changed a lot since the Endingen days, not just because he had got that pivot tooth. He had grown into himself, physically, too, his gangling frame had become rounder, and his movements less agitated. Only his beard was still thin, but that was no longer so striking since it was cut and trimmed into shape once a month. At dinner he wore a soft brown housecoat in whose pockets – how many times Mimi had complained, but the man wouldn’t listen! – he carried far too much paraphernalia. He had covered his head with a small black silk cap.
‘You two had a real adventure today,’ he said. Mimi started in alarm, because she was thinking of Madame Rosa, but her husband was bent over a slice of cold meat with such concentration that he didn’t notice.
‘At least I’ll have something to talk about at home in Baden,’ laughed Hinda.
‘But don’t exaggerate too much!’ For Mimi it was unimaginable that someone could pass on an experience without embellishments. ‘Otherwise they’ll stop you coming to see me.’
‘I hardly think Hinda lets people stop her doing anything very much,’ Pinchas said.
‘It really looked very dangerous. Imagine: our little Hinda and that huge man—’
‘He wasn’t that big,’ Hinda said.
‘—comes charging at us as if he’s about to rob us, with his hair dishevelled and those black, black eyes—’
‘Green eyes,’ said Hinda.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I know,’ said Hinda.
‘Perhaps I should go along to this congress as well,’ Pinchas considered. ‘Talk to a few people and write an article about it.’
‘Are you a shochet or a journalist?’
‘Both.’
‘Can I come along?’ asked Hinda.
‘To the congress?’
‘It might be quite interesting.’
‘Certainement pas!’ said Mimi. ‘That’s absolutely out of the question! I would reproach myself for the rest of my life if anything . . .’
The front doorbell rang in the corridor. Not twice, which according to local minhag would have meant a customer turning up when the shop was shut, after remembering something he absolutely needed from the butcher’s shop, but just once.
‘At this time of the evening?’ said Mimi.
‘Maybe Guttermann wants to know something. Or else it’s someone from the community.’ Pinchas who, say what one liked, was far too easily persuaded to perform his duty, had been elected to various committees, and it wouldn’t have been the first time that someone had dropped in unexpectedly at an inconvenient time to discuss a problem with him.
From outside came the sound of the maid thundering down the stairs to open the front door. The staff changed often in the Pomeranz household. Mimi wasn’t terribly successful at dealing with the staff, one day treating the young things like best friends, and then being unnecessarily strict with them the day after. The ‘speciality of the month’, as Pinchas called each incumbent, was called Regula, and was of rather limited intelligence.
‘Frau Pomeranz,’ she said, when she came into the dining room – and Mimi had dinned it into her a thousand times! – without knocking. ‘There’s a man here.’
‘What sort of man?’
‘I don’t know him,’ Regula said as if that was an end to the matter.
‘Then please ask him his name.’
‘As you wish, Frau Pomeranz.’ Pinchas had only to dart a glance at his wife to know that Regula too would not remain long in her job.
‘It’s so hard to find good staff,’ said Mimi. ‘You have no idea, Hinda.’
‘I’ve asked him now,’ said Regula, coming back into the room.
‘And?’
‘I didn’t catch his name,’ Regula said. ‘It’s something foreign.’
‘Then please ask the gentleman for his visiting card.’
‘Perhaps it would be better if I just . . .’ said Pinchas and was about to get to his feet. But Mimi wouldn’t let him.
‘How is she to learn if we always do her job for her?’
‘He says he hasn’t got a visiting card,’ Regula said a few moments later.
‘Then give him a sheet of paper, and tell him to write his name on it.’ Things were never as complicated as this in the social novels that Mimi always liked to read.
After a further short exchange – Regula asked in all seriousness where she could find some paper, when she dusted in the study every day! – the improvised visiting card lay on the table in front of Pinchas. ‘It’s not even such a difficult name,’ he said.
‘But it is foreign,’ Regula insisted. ‘I’m quite sure of that.’
‘Zalman Kamionker,’ Pinchas read. ‘Do you know who that is?
‘Probably a shnorrer. Regula, does he look like a shnorrer?’
Regula didn’t know what a shnorrer was.
‘We can play this out all evening,’ said Pinchas and stood up. ‘But perhaps there’s another, easier way. Regula, bring the gentleman in.’
‘I don’t think he is a gentleman,’ Regula said. ‘He looks more like a man.’ And she went out to fetch the gentleman, or the man.
‘Kamionker,’ Pinchas repeated thoughtfully. ‘Where can I have heard that name before?’
‘In Galicia.’
It certainly wa
sn’t a gentleman who had come into the room. He wasn’t even holding a hat, just a greasy leather cap.
‘That’s him!’ said Mimi, pointing an accusatory hand. ‘The man from the Palm Garden.’
‘Yes,’ said Hinda. ‘That’s him.’
21
‘The musician gave me the address,’ Zalman Kamionker explained, without the slightest embarrassment. He spoke German in a curious Swabian accent, mixed with scraps of Yiddish. ‘The klezmer, you know the one. The one who was standing by your table. He didn’t want to let me have it, but I shook him. I didn’t really shake him, don’t worry, I just told him I would shake him. I’m a peaceful person.’
‘That’s not how it looked this afternoon,’ Mimi said severely.
‘There are times when words aren’t quite enough. What is one to do?’
He had rough shoes on and his trousers had been darned, but he stood there in the room quite at his ease, legs splayed like a sailor’s, solid on his two feet and prepared for any storm that might come his way. He had put his cap back on and buried his hands in his trouser pockets, not out of embarrassment, but like a craftsman who only unpacks his tools when he needs them. He didn’t seem bothered that they were all staring at him, he just looked back with friendly interest, from Hinda to Mimi, from Mimi to Pinchas and back to Hinda, and then said: ‘Nice place you have here.’ It was an observation, not a compliment.
‘So you’re . . .?’ Pinchas began.
‘Guilty as charged,’ said Zalman Kamionker and didn’t look guilty in the slightest. ‘I didn’t start the brawl, but neither did I run away. Such things happen. What’s a person to do? That’s how it is in politics.’
Melnitz Page 23
