Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’ The uninvited visitor shook his head. ‘Maybe later.’ He put both hands on the table cloth the way one prepares a tool that one is going to use later. His fingernails weren’t quite clean.

  Hinda was still holding her spoon. A grey thread of potato soup dripped unnoticed back onto the plate.

  ‘Alors?’ said Janki patiently. Monsieur Delormes had always said ‘Alors?’ in exactly that tone as well.

  Kamionker nodded gratefully, as if he had just been given the floor at a public assembly. ‘So it’s like this,’ he said, ‘I was in Zurich at this Congress, and now it’s over.’

  Only now did Chanele match him up with the man Mimi had told her about. ‘You’re the man from America,’ she said.

  ‘The Yankee from Kolomea, that’s right.’

  ‘And you’ve come all the way to Baden just to say goodbye to my daughter?’

  Arthur glanced at Hinda out of the corner of his eye. Her teeth were sunk firmly into her lower lip, as he had seen at Aunt Golde’s. ‘That must hurt,’ Arthur thought.

  ‘So it’s like this,’ Kamionker repeated, ‘for the last few days I’ve been at this Congress, and I met a man from Vitebsk. A shoemaker, but a nebbish as weedy as a tailor. His brother emigrated to New York, and so did two of his uncles.’

  ‘Could you kindly explain to us why that should interest us?’ François interrupted him in his most rudely polite voice.

  Kamionker looked at him with unexcited curiosity, as a tourist might look at an unusual piece of local architecture. ‘It wouldn’t interest you,’ he said. ‘But it might interest your sister. Mightn’t it, Fräulein Hinda?’

  ‘I’ve no idea why,’ Hinda said.

  Arthur was surprised. He had a fine ear for such things, and there was something in her voice that he didn’t know.

  ‘I’ll happily tell you,’ said Zalman Kamionker.

  Hinda threw her head back; it wasn’t clear whether she did so in a gesture of rejection, or because it set off her hair.

  ‘This shoemaker,’ Kamionker continued, ‘Jochanan, is his name, by the way, like Rabbi Jochanan out of the Talmud who was also a shoemaker, so this shoemaker has his whole mishpocha in America. And he himself is sitting there in Vitebsk, where a socialist is as popular as a flea in a marriage bed. We know what a shoemaker earns: less than nothing, and from that he still has to make Shabbos. By the time he has enough money saved to go to America, he will have a beard to the ground. Although he has no beard. When he read Karl Marx for the first time, he cut it off. The same day, he told me.’

  Kamionker told his story without haste, a man who is used to speaking in front of an audience and not expecting to be interrupted.

  ‘For ten days he moaned at me about how much he missed his brother, every day it was about this unnecessary Congress. His krechzening was unbearable in the end.’ The Meijers were Swiss Jews, and the word wasn’t familiar to them, but they all understood it anyway. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ asked Kamionker. ‘I had to shut him up somehow.’ He spread his arms as if to hug somebody. ‘So I gave him my ticket.’

  The Jewish cloak-makers of New York had given money, each according to his ability, to send Zalman Kamionker as their delegate to the big Congress in Switzerland. A crossing – in the cheapest steerage class, of course, but a crossing is a crossing and you’re not handed it on a plate – and a ticket for the railway. Only in fourth class, obviously, but it still cost money. And what did he do with it? He gave it all to someone he’d only just met. To a shoemaker from Vitebsk.

  ‘He’s already on the way,’ said Kamionker. ‘Zurich-Paris. Paris-Le Havre. Le Havre-New York. Although, there, God knows, they have quite enough shoemakers already. Yes, Fräulein Hinda, that’s how it is.’

  Hinda didn’t look at him, ignored him with all her might, as one can only do with a person who interests one more than anyone else does, and so it was Chanele who asked him. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m staying in Switzerland,’ said Kamionker. ‘A tailor has it easy. He can starve anywhere.’

  ‘Then go ahead and starve!’ said François icily. ‘Just please don’t do it here.’

  Kamionker gave him a friendly smile, as if he’d just been paid a compliment. He had delivered lots of speeches at lots of assembles and knew how to deal with hecklers.

  ‘That’s an interesting moustache you have there,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know Purim was celebrated so late in Switzerland.’ Purim is the festival of ridiculous disguises.

  If Chanele hadn’t laughed so loudly, François would doubtless have come up with a brilliant riposte.

  Kamionker turned a contemptuous shoulder towards him, as one does to a defeated opponent upon whom one doesn’t even have to keep an eye, and turned to Janki. ‘And as I’m going to be staying here,’ he said, ‘I have something I’d like to talk to you about, Herr Meijer.’

  ‘He’s looking for a job,’ thought Janki. ‘He’s a tailor, and I have a clothes shop. But like hell am I going to put such a louse in my fur.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ he began. But Kamionker cut in.

  ‘Perhaps you’d rather we withdrew to a different room?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Janki, and reached for his walking stick as if for a weapon.

  ‘That’s fine too.’ Kamionker struck his hands together, so loudly that Arthur gave a start, and stretched, making his joints crack.

  ‘He has strong hands,’ Hinda thought, and waited with bated breath to see what he would say next.’

  ‘Do you have a union in your company?’ said Zalman Kamionker.

  A union? Was that why he had come?

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’ asked Janki.

  ‘Well,’ said Kamionker, ‘it would make things easier to understand.’

  ‘My employees don’t need a union.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Kamionker, ‘or maybe not. We could argue about that. But another time. We’ll have other opportunities.’

  ‘The hell we will,’ thought Janki.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Kamionker. ‘If you’d negotiated with unions, you would know that there are only two kinds of demands: the ones you can talk about, and the ones that are non-negotiable. Is that clear?’

  ‘The man is meshuga,’ thought Janki. ‘Simply meshuga.’

  ‘In our case, Herr Meijer: we can talk about anything.’ Kamionker held his open palms out in front of him, as chiefs did in Arthur’s books about Indians, when they wanted to show that they hadn’t unburied the hatchet. ‘I’ll go still further; you can determine how you want to have it done, and it will be done like that. I am a peaceful man. Only one thing is not negotiable.’

  ‘What’s he actually talking about?’ thought Hinda.

  ‘Absolutely non-negotiable,’ said Zalman Kamionker.

  ‘What are you actually talking about?’ asked Janki.

  ‘About Fräulein Hinda, of course. I’m going to marry her.’

  Had he said ‘marry’?

  Fat Christine had spent the whole evening in the kitchen consoling the weeping Louisli. The two girls knew nothing at all about what was going on in the dining room. And this time there really would have been something worth listening to at the door.

  Janki said no, of course he said no. Here was a complete and total stranger, a man who was nothing and had nothing, and he just wanted . . . ‘Out of the question,’ said Janki, and because Kamionker who’d dropped in out of nowhere didn’t seem to hear it, he repeated it again, ‘Out of the question. Absolutely out of the question.’ One had heard a few things about Galician customs, that they were rougher than elsewhere, in the East such rag-and-bone-man behaviour might be common practice; he was unable to judge. That is: his judgement was firm, absolutely firm, and no further discussion was required for that reason. They were not in the Balkans, and certainly not in America, so the issue was not open for debate, it wasn’t open for debate, and there was an end to it, full stop, period. By the way it was probably the bes
t for all if Kamionker took his leave forthwith.

  Herr Kamionker smiled, quite peacefully, as he had once smiled quite peacefully at Simon Heller of the tallis-weaving mill in Heller’s office, and said Herr Meijer must not have heard him correctly, he had said quite clearly that this point was non-negotiable.

  Janki raised his stick and was about to bring it down on the table, but lowered it again straight away, not out of fear, of course, after all, he’d been in the war, but he’d just had the lion’s-head handle glued back on, and if it happened again, they had warned him in the turner’s workshop, that fine piece of craftsmanship might no longer be reparable.

  At that François leapt to his feet, the tips of his moustache on end, and grabbed Kamionker by the collar, grabbed the thick material of his jacket with his fist and was about to throw out this unruly guest, but Kamionker just sat there as if no one were tugging away at him, and it was only when François grabbed him with his other hand as well and tried to pull him up as a clumsy person might try to lift a heavy piece of luggage, that Kamionker flicked him away, there could be no better word for it, he just flicked him away, wearing an expression as if it were just a piece of high-spirited banter among friends.

  That was exactly how he had smiled, with big white teeth, in the Palm Garden, when he had tripped over Hinda and landed right in her lap.

  ‘The police!’ François gasped breathlessly. ‘We need to call the police.’

  ‘Police? Narrishkeit!’ said Zalman Kamionker. That was another word that people in Switzerland didn’t know and yet understood. He picked a crystal carafe off the table and weighed it in his hand as if checking its suitability as a missile. François took shelter behind his chair.

  Arthur noticed with some pride and a little disbelief that he wasn’t scared at all, even though he would have had every reason to be.

  Kamionker looked at the carafe thoughtfully and set it back down on the table-cloth. ‘You are rich people,’ he said Janki. ‘All right then. It’s not something I’ve chosen myself, but there’s nothing I can do about it. So if it’s about the dowry – we don’t need one. I’ve always made everything in my life with my own hands.’

  ‘It’s not about the dowry!’ said Janki in too loud a voice, and propped a hand on his hip as Monsieur Delormes had always done.

  ‘As you wish. I’ve said before: on all these points I am happy to abide by your wishes.’

  It was the second time in only two days that Janki began to shout. Louisli would have had more to eavesdrop on today than yesterday, but she was too busy pouring her heart out to the fat cook. You can pour out a full heart for as long as you like, it doesn’t get any emptier.

  And neither did Janki’s fury subside just because he gave it such noisy expression. On the contrary: it just went on growing until he could only make little yapping noises, as when one runs out of breath on an over-inflated stomach. Except that in this instance there was no sodium bicarbonate powder to grant him relief.

  Eventually he fell completely silent. The eruption was over. Zalman Kamionker had waited quite calmly, a specialist in pyrotechnics who knows exactly when a Roman candle has burnt itself out. Then he turned to Chanele. ‘And what do you think, Frau Meijer?’

  Chanele looked at him for a long time, from the greasy leather cap to the peasant shoes, from the unkempt hair to the fingernails with the black edges. She raised her eyebrows so that the black line seemed to occupy the middle of her forehead, and then asked the question that Arthur would have asked long ago if he had not been a little boy but an adult just like the others. ‘Have you talked to Hinda about it?’

  Hinda was still holding her soup spoon, and now set it down as carefully as one might set a lucky ladybird that had landed on one’s hand from a leaf.

  ‘Nu?’ asked Chanele, when Kamionker didn’t reply.

  Zalman was embarrassed as only someone can be for whom embarrassment is an entirely unfamiliar feeling.

  ‘So it’s like this,’ he said and hesitated. ‘I thought I had to ask the parents first.’

  ‘Narrishkeit,’ said Chanele, already knowing that this would become one of her favourite words.

  ‘I wanted . . .’ said Kamionker.

  ‘Ask her!’

  Meanwhile Janki had recovered the use of speech. ‘It’s absolutely out of the . . .’ he began.

  ‘Scha!’ said Chanele.

  Zalman Kamionker, who had been so confident until this point, now studied his hands, like an instrument that he had never learned to play. Then he held them out to Hinda, as shyly as a little child handing a bouquet to a queen. ‘Fräulein Hinda,’ he asked, ‘will you . . .?’

  Hinda kept him waiting, and only after a few endless seconds she said, ‘What am I supposed to do? If it’s non-negotiable . . .’

  31

  It was June already, and Mimi still wasn’t feeling any better. She was so bloated that she couldn’t bring herself to look in the mirror, although – ‘Comme ça me dégoûte!’ – she couldn’t keep anything down. Pinchas sometimes heard her retching when he got up very early in the morning to lay tefillin.

  Sophie, the successor to the unfortunate Regula, was something of an expert in herbs, and treated Mimi with teas whose exact recipes, as she proudly explained, were in her family only ever passed on to the oldest daughter, to some extent as a dowry. She herself, she said with a significant expression, would probably pass on the secret knowledge to her niece, because Sophie didn’t like men. Pinchas often hadn’t even heard the names of the plants and roots that she boiled up in his kitchen, and who passed on their penetrating smell to his food. Mimi at first swore by Sophie’s arts, and a tea from a garden weed called cinquefoil – Sophie called it crampwort – even brought her a certain relief. But then, after a visit to her home village, Sophie made a brew of buckthorn bar that gave Mimi diarrhoea for several days. That was the end of the herbal cures, and a new maid called Gesine Hunziker was taken on.

  Mimi was also – although Pinchas wasn’t allowed to know anything about it – again attending séances at Madame Rosa’s. But the voices from beyond could give her no advice, quite the contrary. The only message she received was, ‘There is much youth in you,’ and Mimi perceived this as transcendental mockery, because she was secretly convinced that her problems had to do with a feared time in the life of a woman, which Golde had prudishly referred to as ‘the change’. Mimi was far too young for that, in fact, but she had always been particularly troubled by such things, other people had no idea how.

  For weeks Pinchas had wanted to seek advice from Dr Wertheim, but Mimi categorically refused; she didn’t like dealing with doctors. At the time when she lost her chid, no one had been able to help her, and spending a pile of money just so that someone can explain in Latin that he hasn’t a clue? Certainement pas!

  ‘I’m not sick,’ she said, ‘I just don’t feel good, and it wouldn’t be half as bad if you didn’t make such a fuss about it.’

  That Sunday, when Pinchas had to go to Endingen early for a debate, her feeling of nausea wouldn’t subside. In fact Mimi had wanted to go with him; she hadn’t seen her childhood friend Anne-Kathrin for ages, and it would have been a good opportunity. Anne-Kathrin still lived in Endingen, but hadn’t lived in the school house for a long time. She had married the eldest son of master butcher Gubser, and had since then written Mimi regular letters, in which, in her tiny handwriting, she had told her of all the amazing progress that her four unusually gifted children were making week by week. The terrifying perfection of these offspring had been reason enough for the childless Mimi to put the trip off time and again, and secretly she was quite glad to have the state of her health as an excuse to herself. More than an excuse, God knows, because the very thought of the smoke from the locomotive filled her mouth with such a bitter taste that in the end she gave in and promised to call the doctor, ‘yes, definitely today’. Dr Wertheim was part of the community, he shouldn’t have been sent for on Shabbos, but on a Sunday that wasn’t a problem. An
d now if Pinchas would be so kind as to set off on his trip, Mimi said, and not miss his train on her account, because his excessive concern would eventually turn her into a truly sick woman.

  Pinchas had to stop outside the flat door and take a deep breath with his eyes closed. My God, how he loved that woman! She simply had to regain her health!

  He had prepared well for the debate in Endingen, had even collected far too many arguments until he finally he thought he had a retort for every possible objection. After all, he wasn’t just a shochet, he was also a journalist. He was good with words, he was a modern person, even though he took the traditions of his faith seriously, and that made him – he had reached the conclusion after initial doubts – the ideal representative of the Jewish perspective. He could counter the animal-protection people who thought shechita was an unnecessary cruelty with the experience of his professional life. In the abattoirs where Jewish and Christian butchers worked side by side, he really knew better than all these sensitive do-gooders. There was no place there for the delicacies of the drawing-room, either on the Jewish or the Christian side. Sausages and chops didn’t grow on trees. And what was far more important: he could prove to them with concrete examples that the modern captive bolt method that had been given such publicity over the last few years by no means guaranteed a painless slaughter. In the end, regardless of which method one used, it all depended on the sure hand of the slaughterer. And who did his work more carefully? The uninterested Christian butcher’s boy who could always improve matters with a second attempt, a stab to the neck or a blow to the head, even with two or three blows when the animal was still twitching, or the Jewish slaughterer who could turn the whole animal into treyf with a small mistake, who risked his own parnooseh at each individual slaughter, and who therefore . . . No, he couldn’t say ‘parnooseh’, he told himself, he had to speak the language of the people in the hall, and not make himself an outsider.

  So he had put on his most goyish suit, grey virgin wool and actually far too hot for this time of year. He had taken the suit as settlement of an unpaid meat bill from tailor Turkawka, who had actually made the piece for a professor at the Confederate Technical College, who had wanted to wear it at his inaugural lecture. But then he hadn’t been appointed after all, and had never collected the suit. Mimi had told Pinchas off at the time for being too easy-going and allowing himself to be exploited, but basically she had been proud of him, he had seen that she was. Turkawka had adapted the suit for him; it fit perfectly, and Pinchas didn’t look at all Jewish in it. Apart from his little black silk cap, of course. Perhaps in the service of the good cause he should just . . .