Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘I don’t know if I want to hear it.’

  ‘Of course you want to hear it. You are a curious person. Did you not come here just to ask me questions?’

  ‘Not these questions!’

  ‘Because the answers might shatter your picture of the world?’

  ‘No!’

  But Pinchas stopped making as if to stand up, and Dr Stern laughed, making his watch chain skip, wiped his moustache and said, ‘Let’s wait a moment! So, as I said, I had understood at last that I could no longer perform my office. Because – unlike most people, as I have been forced time and again to observe – I am not afraid of drawing conclusions from my discoveries, I decided to draw a clear line. So I wrote to the Supreme Royal Württemberg Rabbinate and declared to them, to my superior authority, that I was abdicating from Jewry.’

  ‘What nonsense!’ Pinchas had raised his voice too loudly again, and really had to force himself to utter his next sentences in a more moderate tone. To his annoyance it now sounded as if he were about to confide an intimate secret to the man beside him on the bench. ‘You can’t step down from Jewry! We’re not a club!’

  ‘That’s exactly what the Supreme Rabbinate said to me. Amongst some very wordy admonitions. But I am a consistent person, and someone who doesn’t want to play the game no longer needs to adhere to the rules. So at the next Yom Kippur I went and stood with a bag of ham rolls outside the main synagogue in Stuttgart, and when all the dignitaries walked out of the door with their black top hats on . . .’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’ Pinchas had leapt to his feet, and he no longer cared in the slightest that passers-by were staring at him. ‘You should be thoroughly, thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

  Dr Stern smiled in friendly challenge at the man who stood so furiously before him. ‘A pity you aren’t Catholic. “Apage, Satanas” would simply sound better.’

  ‘Ashamed!’

  ‘You have said that before, my dear friend. But perhaps you should consider whether you yourself might not have more reason to be so. A man of your profession.’

  ‘What does my profession . . .?’

  ‘You are a shochet, are you not? And thus a professional, approved animal-torturer.’

  ‘I’m not a . . .’

  ‘You shouldn’t shout so loudly. The two policemen coming along the path over there already look quite suspicious.’

  Pinchas had no choice but to sit down again.

  ‘How can you claim that a shochet . . .?’

  But Dr Stern had suddenly stopped enjoying the debate. He drew a watch from his waistcoat pocket and let it spring open. ‘So late? I’m neglecting my duties as a delegate. Do you know what, dear friend? Read my brochure. Animal Torture and Animal Life in Jewish Literature. Available in every bookshop. With a rabbinical-theological appendix about shechita. It might interest you. I have been told that this little essay will play a big part in the coming plebiscite in these parts. Now farewell, dear friend, farewell.’

  25

  At the same time as Pinchas was talking to Jakob Stern or, as he later said only half ironically, arguing with the devil, his wife received an unexpected visitor.

  Mimi wasn’t feeling well that day. It was probably because of the much too sultry weather that she felt dizzy when she tried to stand up, and had to lie down in bed for an hour again with a cloth soaked in lemon water over her forehead. Regula, the great lump, wanted to open the curtains without the slightest delicacy, when a beam of light would go like a knife through the head of a sensitive person in such a condition. Later Mimi even had to throw up, and it was already almost eleven when she finally summoned the strength to leave her room. In a peignoir of salmon-coloured crêpe Georgette had lined with matt silk, which set off the pallor of her face to extremely good effect, she crept through the flat like a ghost. Nothing was moving anywhere. Even the breakfast plates were still on the dining-room table. If one wasn’t constantly chasing them – Pinchas had no idea! – the servants immediately became slapdash.

  She found Regula, Frau Küttel, the cleaner, and last of all Hinda in the kitchen where they all, at a time when the preparations for lunch should really have been far advanced, were drinking coffee with lumps of bread and, as far as Mimi could tell from the sentence that broke off mid-word as she appeared, discussing Regula’s favourite topic, the question of whether the tram driver at whom she had been making eyes for weeks now, might have more serious intentions. Mimi had to become quite fierce, although that was far from easy in her condition, and she also had to tell Hinda, who often had quite déclassé tendencies, off for socialising with the staff. Hinda merely laughed and said that in all honesty she found Regula’s love story more interesting than any novel, at least she had never yet come across a novel in which a gallant had slapped his sweetheart on the backside and said appreciatively, ‘You’re better padded than my horses.’

  Later – she still lacked the strength to get dressed – Mimi went through the contents of her clothes cupboard with Hinda. The Hachnasat Kallah Association, which supplied dresses for impoverished brides, had organised a collection of cast-off clothes, and as wife of the community shochet – ‘You can’t imagine how people watch you!’ – Mimi felt obliged to contribute something. But it was actually only a pretext to spread out the treasures of her wardrobe once again.

  She had just taken out a day dress of greyish brown silk twill with a maroon rose pattern, a dress that had always suited her very well, but the skirt of which she really couldn’t wear any more, because it still had a cul de Paris cut, and that was truly out of fashion once and for all, and she was busy persuading Hinda that the tight-fitting jacket with the little collar and the jacquard trimming on the cuffs would actually suit her youthful figure very well, although obviously with a different skirt, they would donate the old one to the impoverished brides, and in all that activity she had begun to forget how poorly she was actually feeling, when there was a ring at the flat door. ‘I’m not at home to anyone!’ Mimi called and, pained by the wound of her own voice, had to draw little circles on her temples with her fingertips.

  ‘Frau Pomeranz isn’t at home,’ they heard Regula explaining a little later. And then, in response to an inaudible objection from the visitor, the maid added. ‘She definitely isn’t! She just told me herself.’

  Hinda bit her hand so as not to burst out laughing. Mimi rolled her eyes with a long-suffering expression.

  Regula’s protest, increasingly uncertain and hence increasingly shrill, made it clear that the uninvited guest would not be fobbed off as easily as that, and at last the maid knocked at the room of the door and said, ‘I’m sorry, Frau Pomeranz, but there’s a lady here who absolutely . . .’

  ‘It’s me!’ a voice rang out from the corridor.

  ‘Mama!’ Hinda exclaimed and pulled the door open.

  Regula watched the embrace between mother and daughter with disapproval. ‘I told her you weren’t here,’ she explained reproachfully to Mimi. ‘But she came in anyway.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it,’ Regula grumbled, as insulted as someone whose cake has been a failure because of a deliberately incorrect recipe, and withdrew to the kitchen again, to continue analysing the presumed intentions of the tram driver.

  Chanele must have come straight from the station; the smell of the locomotives still clung to her. She was not, however, as the rules of etiquette would have dictated, wearing a travelling suit, but her ‘uniform’ that she usually wore in the shop, and a hat that had not been en vogue at least since last season.

  ‘You haven’t even put on gloves!’ Mimi said reproachfully.

  ‘Nor you a dress.’

  ‘You have no idea how dreadful I feel.’

  ‘Have you come to pick me up?’ Hinda asked, and didn’t seem at all keen on the idea.

  ‘Let’s talk about that later. Now I have something to discuss with Mimi. Alone.’ Chanele said it in a tone that her daughter had ne
ver heard before: not actually severe, that would have been the wrong word, but such that it wouldn’t have occurred to one to contradict her.

  Hinda curtsied obediently. ‘Then I’ll be in the kitchen.’

  ‘Tell Regula to clear away the breakfast things,’ Mimi called after her. ‘And that lunch . . .’ She put her hand to her brow and sighed. ‘Although I myself couldn’t eat a single . . . I can’t even think about it.’

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘Ach!’ said Mimi, and the dame de salon at the municipal theatre could not have outdone her bravely dismissive gesture. She was about to lead her guest into the dining-room – ‘Although everything is still standing around in there; I don’t know how I end up with such terrible staff!’ – but Chanele shook her head.

  ‘Let’s go into your room. It seems . . . how shall I put it? It seems more appropriate to me.’

  There wasn’t even room for the two of them to sit down; the bed and both chairs were covered with clothes. Automatically, as she would have done in the shop, Chanele started clearing things away, while Mimi squatted on the Turkish pouffe by her dressing table and dabbed her temples with eau de cologne. For a while the only sound was the rustle of fabric and the click of hangers.

  ‘Mimi,’ Chanele said at last and studied the moiré effect on a yontev dress as intently as if she had never seen anything similar in all her time in the trade. ‘Mimi . . . Did it bother you very much that we never wanted to call you Miriam?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘There was a time when that was very important to you. Back then I never understood, but today . . . It would have been your real name, you had a right to it, and all of us – whether out of habit or cosiness – only ever called you Mimi.’

  ‘But I’m called Mimi.’

  ‘Of course, today.’ Chanele held the dress high to shake it out. It looked as if she were dancing with a life-sized doll, the gently rustling material a curtain between the two women. ‘But you never wondered whether you might have turned into a completely different person if you had had your own name?’

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’ Mimi said it in the pitiful voice of a child that doesn’t want to go to school. ‘I have a headache.’

  Chanele hung the dress in the cupboard and said, more into the black opening that smelled of old experiences than to Mimi: ‘I don’t understand it myself.’

  She had already cleared a chair, and now she carried it over to the dressing table and sat down opposite Mimi, so close that their knees almost touched. Janki, long ago now, had once sat opposite Chanele like that. She had been afraid to look at him, but she had felt his breath. She had been almost naked at the time, so wonderfully naked. And then he had asked her . . .

  What had she expected? If you have notions, it’s your own fault.

  She took Mimi’s right hand, leaned over, breathed in the smell of bedroom and eau de cologne and suddenly kissed those strange fingertips.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mimi asked and drew her hand back.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just . . . We aren’t sisters, you and I. We have never been friends, either. No, don’t contradict me. There was no friendship between us, not even when we were sleeping in the same bed. They stuffed us together the way I’ve just stuffed your dresses into the cupboard, velvet next to duchesse and black next to olive, as they happened to come. We didn’t choose each other. We got along, somehow, you with me and I with you. And when we laughed together – one also laughs with random acquaintances. But we told our secrets to others. You to your Anne-Kathrin and I to my pillow. It worked quite well, didn’t it, Mimi? It worked quite well.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want.’

  Sometimes Mimi still had the same whining voice that she had had as a little girl, when she answered everything that sounded like criticism with a precautionary wail.

  ‘Everything was fine until Janki came. You remember? The bandage with the blood that wasn’t his? Of course you remember. We both did everything wrong, back then, me too. And so we never became friends. I regret that now. Because after all that time we belong together. Don’t you think so, Miriam?’

  Mimi had never been able to hide her emotions. Even now Chanele could read everything happening in her on her face: surprise, the beginning of an argument, the beginning of a reconciliation and then a sly don’t-show-a-thing expression. As children they had often played ‘scissors, stone, paper’, and that was exactly what Mimi had looked like every time she had been determined not to be gulled. ‘Did you come to Zurich to tell me that?’ she asked.

  ‘No, that’s not why. And I don’t want you to give me an answer, either. That will grow eventually. I came because I need your help.’

  ‘What for?’

  Chanele took two of the colourful bottles from the dressing table and tinkled them together like wine glasses. ‘You need to find a shidduch,’ she said.

  Mimi was a bit disappointed that Chanele had anticipated her secret plan before she’d been able to put it into operation, so she argued against it. ‘Hinda has no interest whatsoever in that kind of thing.’

  ‘A shidduch for François.’

  Mimi was so startled that her tongue hung out of her mouth.

  ‘Shmul?’

  ‘His name is François. Whether I like it or not.’

  ‘But he’s far too young to get married!’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Chanele, ‘he’s old enough.’

  ‘The boy is twenty-one.’

  ‘And he isn’t to get married straight away. But soon. As soon as possible.’

  ‘How could Janki come up with such a meshugena idea?’

  ‘Janki knows nothing about it.’

  ‘And you want . . .?’

  ‘If you help me.’

  Mimi looked at Chanele in amazement, thought – scissors? stone? paper? – and then held her hand out. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.

  It was good to talk about it. About François’s smile, in which the eyes didn’t smile too, that fake, polite smile with which he had always frightened Chanele, even when he was still a little boy, because even then his face had been like a book in a foreign language. How he had once, at five or six, persuaded another little boy, the godson of a cook, to put his hand on the red-hot oven door and how then, when the boy wept and screamed, he had said quite unmoved, ‘I just wanted to see if I could make him do it.’ How he had always brought good reports home from school, without really doing anything for them, because he always found someone to do his homework for him or let him copy it; how on Shabbos, when he was forbidden to do any kind of work, three or four of his fellow pupils would often be waiting for him outside the front door, practically beating each other up to be allowed to carry his schoolbag. One of his teachers had once, when he went with his wife to the Emporium and Chanele introduced herself to him, actually raved about what a gifted, yes, he had no qualms about putting it like that, what a blessed son she had, and François, when she mentioned it, had smiled his smile and said, ‘He’s a pushover; he has podagra, and on the days when he limps particularly badly, you just have to ask him how he is.’ Then, when he started helping in the shop, in the Drapery Store with Janki rather than with Chanele in the Emporium, he made a game of bringing the customer unsaleable pieces, goods from last year or with small flaws, and was pleased every time he talked someone into a sale and they were grateful to him. Chanele also described François’s very idiosyncratic way of speaking, which she called ‘poisoned’, because he was apparently able to say the most challenging things very politely, with a smile and a bow from the hip, and she told of how he felt superior to other people and despised those people for it.

  For once Mimi was a good listener. She nodded or tilted her head back and forth in a amazement, said, ‘Vraiment?’ or ‘Mon Dieu!’ and didn’t let go of Chanele’s hand all the while.

  But then when Chanele got to the evening of the goyish dinner, when she told of how Mathilde Lutz had knocked at
her office door and told her that a young salesgirl was pregnant, and by whom, in her excitement Mimi forgot to speak French, exclaimed, ‘me neshuma!’ and ‘Shema beni!’ and patted Chanele’s hand as one does on a sickbed visit, when one wants to give the patient more hope than one actually feels.

  In forty years the two women had never been so close.

  ‘What are you going to do about the girl? Mimi asked at last. ‘Such a thing could be a scandal, particularly in a small town like your Baden.’

  ‘I know,’ said Chanele, and didn’t seem to be particularly worried about a scandal. ‘But I’ve already got something under way.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ thought Mimi, ‘sometimes Chanele has a smile not that unlike her son’s. Except that she would be horrified if she knew.’ She felt a sudden urge to take Chanele in her arms and press her very, very firmly to her. But of course she didn’t, she just asked, ‘And Shmul . . .?’

  ‘His name is François.’

  ‘Do you think he loves her?’

  Chanele shook his head. ‘He just wanted to see if he could make her do it.’

  ‘And now you want to marry him soon?’

  ‘I think it will be the best thing. Because it will rein him in. It’s not a good solution, but it’s still the best one.’

  Mimi stroked her friend’s fingers. Her friend? So be it: her friend. Those hands that had worked for so long in Golde’s kitchen had become no less rough during the years when Chanele had been Madame Meijer.

  ‘I’ve got a secret to tell you,’ Mimi said, and her sudden courage turned her cheeks quite red. ‘The loveliest thing for me, the loveliest thing ever, would have been to have children of my own. But if I can’t have any, if it simply isn’t to be, then the second loveliest would be to make a shidduch for others. I sometimes think: I’m God’s experiment to see if one can make a mother-in-law from scratch.’ She laughed as she said it, but she meant it in all seriousness.

  On the dressing table, among all the fashionable fripperies, there was a diary. Its pages were still quite empty, even though it was for the year 1887. Mimi hadn’t bought it then because she needed it, but because it was bound in such beautiful Morocco leather, exactly the same leather as the money bag that Janki had used so many years ago to open his own shop . . . Anyway. It had a little silver pencil which she now picked up, flipped the diary open and said like a waiter taking an order: ‘So, Madame Meijer! I’m listening!’ She looked girlishly dainty, sitting there with her head tilted expectantly to one side, and the sight made Chanele feel slightly sad in a not disagreeable way, like entries in an old poetry album.