‘In the leg,’ said Janki. ‘But the pain is bearable. I only feel it when the weather turns.’ Chanele was holding her handkerchief in front of her face again. The smell from the old upholstery was really very unpleasant.
By the time the train arrived in Hoyerschleuse the two men were the best of friends, and had firmly agreed to see one another on the island very soon. Staudinger, who planned to meet a few comrades here before travelling on to Sylt on the same ship, found them another porter for their luggage – he could put his booming, order-issuing voice on and off like a coat – gave Chanele another smacking kiss on the hand and bade farewell to Janki by resting his hand against the brim of his rifleman’s cap in the military style.
It was only when the luggage had been counted – two trunks, a new Russian leather suitcase, four hatboxes – and the porter had been paid, that Chanele managed to speak to Janki.
‘What sort of shmontses are you telling that man?’ she said. ‘The ladies in Baden might believe your adventures, but this fellow Staudinger was really at Sedan. An unpleasant person, by the way, with that scar.’
‘I can’t see it that way.’ They were standing side by side leaning on the railing of the Freya, watching the burly sailors untying the ship’s hawsers with insulted expressions, as if the ferry service for guests at the spa was far below the dignity of a true Christian seafarer.
‘Janki Meijer, the hero of Sedan!’
‘Scha!’ Janki turned round in horror. Luckily no one had heard.
‘Just a shame you forgot to pack your medals.’
‘What medals?’
‘The ones awarded to you by Napoleon the Third in person. For special bravery in the face of the enemy.’
For all those years Chanele hadn’t worried when Janki described the few glorious memories of his time in the military more colourfully each time. It hadn’t really bothered her, and in the company there was, God knows, enough to do that was more important. But since Janki had sold the Modern Emporium over her head, she no longer felt obliged to take his sensitivities into account. Chanele had grown bitter, almost from one day to the next, not argumentative, but obstinate, and as Janki had a very bad conscience about giving up the business, and could therefore not admit a mistake, there were more and more violent arguments between them.
Like a wine stored for too long, after forty years their marriage had turned sour.
‘You don’t understand,’ said Janki. ‘In a spa town like this you have to know the right people or else you’re left alone. So now we have an entrée into high society.’
‘Make shabbos with that!’ Chanele turned her back on her husband and for the next few minutes was very busy observing the flock of seagulls following the ship out of the harbour as a screeching escort.
Chanele’s unconcealed disapproval and the quiet anxiety that she might be right spoiled Janki’s delight in the preferential treatment they received as they put in at Sylt. While other passengers had to take pot luck with coaches, or even had to linger forlorn and abandoned beside their mountains of luggage, they had a liveried chauffeur waiting for them, with the word Atlantic emblazoned on his cap in gold letters. They were the only new arrivals who had booked in at this hotel in the very top category, and Janki was almost slightly disappointed that his new friend Staudinger was nowhere to be seen. He would have liked to wave at him in comradely fashion from the automobile that stood ready for the journey to the hotel, or even offered to take him into Westerland. There would have been enough room, because the car, at least as grand as François’s Buchet, had two spacious rows of seats as well as the chauffeur’s seat. Their cases, and Janki found this particularly elegant, were not simply tied on at the back, but jogged along behind them on a luggage car pulled by two horses.
They were welcomed at the hotel with much bowing and scraping, and that subservient attitude continued like that all day to such an extent that Chanele said ironically that you learned to tell the different employees apart by the backs of their heads. Their suite, ‘the best in the whole hotel’, said the fawning porter, had all the comforts of the modern age, electric lights, a bathroom of their own and a whole row of bell-pulls with which the correct employee could be summoned for any special wishes they might have.
‘You see how we’re welcomed here?’ said Janki, when they were on their own at last.
‘Like anyone else who’s expected to provide a decent tip.’
‘Better than anyone else.’ He had assumed a mysterious expression, but Chanele didn’t do him the favour of showing any curiosity, so he had to report the chachma that he’d thought up, and of which he was very proud, unasked. ‘I asked Herr Strähle, the manager, to notify his colleague here that we were particularly important guests. What do you think of that?’
‘Narrishkeit,’ was all Chanele had to say on the matter.
42
A lady’s maid could be summoned with the buttons on the bell panel, who would be willing to help madam get dressed at any time, the cringing porter had assured them upon their arrival. To Janki’s annoyance, renewed every day, Chanele strictly refused to take advantage of this service, even though it was included in the price of the room and would thus be paid for anyway. Every time he demanded that she change her outfit for the promenade, the table d’hôte or a drinks party – he liked, since it was after all his field, to decide which dress was right for which occasion – he had to open all the complicated ribbons himself and tie them all again, and manoeuvre the thousand little hooks into the tiny eyes. Where does it say in the Shulchan Aruch that if a man wants to belong to fine society in his dotage, one has to help him in his meshugas?
Unlike Arthur, who as a child had loved to use every opportunity to get closer to his mother by giving her a helping hand of this kind, Janki hated this toilet service. But Chanele forced him to do it, precisely because she knew that her body, now old and flabby, was unpleasant to him. Janki loved the external, the effect; he had not had his suits tailored to be comfortable to wear, but so that he would look good in them. What he admired most about court tailor Kniže, who was increasingly easing out his old master Delormes from his personal Pantheon, was his ball suit, which, according to the Journal des Modes, he had once produced for a misshapen member of the imperial household, ‘so perfectly cut that the hump was no longer apparent’. When she wore one of her expensive dresses, Chanele was as he wanted to see her: the well-to-do wife of a successful businessman. In blouse and corset the woman standing there was just a grandmother with withered skin, and if Janki had bought her an expensive eau de toilette on their first stroll around Westerland, he had not done so by chance. He thought he smelled age and decay on her, and he couldn’t bear it because it scared him.
Janki was not unskilled as a dresser. He was familiar with fabrics and dresses, and when Chanele was fully disguised, as she herself put it, he also tried to find the right jewellery and accessories to go with it. It was the only part of the ritual that he enjoyed.
Today he had taken a summer outfit in ivory crépon from the wardrobe. For a reason that he never talked about, he was particularly fond of this dress. It was more than a dozen years ago now that he had once involuntarily listened in on the conversation of a couple he didn’t know, but he could still hear the wife’s loud voice. ‘What bothers me most about these Jewish women,’ she had said, ‘is that they are all so fat.’ The crépon dress was accompanied by an unusual patent leather belt that stressed Chanele’s narrow waist and made it clear to any observer that she didn’t need to hide her figure behind pleated tulle or artfully draped floral garlands. If Janki imagined who that imaginary observer was, he now thought always of his new friend Staudinger.
The spa orchestra in the Music Shell on the promenade now wore theatrical uniforms from the time of the Napoleonic War; there was a ‘Fatherland Concert’ on the programme, which meant that the eight musicians would have to play one military march after another, even though their instrumentation wasn’t really suited to it. But the so
le trumpeter tried gamely, and the band leader – whom Monsieur Fleur-Vallée would have mocked as as a pitiful dilettante – had for once set his violin aside and instead rattled the instrument known as a Turkish crescent. The spa guests seemed to like it; the ladies hummed along with the memorable tunes, and sent the flower arrangements on their hats bobbing rhythmically; the men tapped their walking sticks on the ground in time with the music. A few children had shouldered the little spades with which they usually built castles on the beach, and marched eagerly back and forth under the orders of a twelve-year-old.
Chanele’s toilet – why did she object to being helped by a lady’s maid? – took time, and then Janki himself couldn’t decide between three different ties. When at last they reached the Music Shell, at a comfortable stroll as befitted the spa promenade, even though they had allowed good time, all the white painted chairs were already occupied. They were not the only ones who had to stand, but Janki, who was staying in the most expensive hotel in town, was extremely dissatisfied with the lack of foresight from the spa administration. There was not a sign of Staudinger, even though the selection of music would have been to his taste.
While Janki looked searchingly around, ready to doff his hat at any moment, even though no one knew him here apart from his railway acquaintance, Chanele gazed with fascination at the orchestra’s cellist, an elderly gentleman with fine, narrow features. The tunes of the Fatherland Programme were all written in the same 4/4 march rhythm, and the cellist seemed visibly to be suffering from the undemanding qualities of the music that he was having to play. He was indeed scraping his bow quite correctly – one, two, one, two – across the strings, but he kept his eyes closed, as if he could no longer bear to see the conductor with his Turkish crescent. He bobbed his head back and forth to a quite different rhythm, moving his lips as he did so. Chanele imagined that as he did his duty he was singing an inaudible counter-melody to himself, a song that belonged to him alone, and which no one could take from him.
After each individual piece of music the gentlemen applauded, and the ladies patted their fine gloves together. The short break produced each time the pages were turned was suddenly broken by a piercing cry, and a little boy in a sailor suit ran from the troop of drilling children, who were at that moment presenting their spades in file, and pushed his way through the rows of seats in search of his mother. Now children on the spa promenade were thoroughly tolerated; as long as they remained cute and silent even complete strangers patted them on the head and gave them a sixpence for their piggy-banks. But this little boy was noisy, his cries were penetrating and to top it all he carried behind him a spade that was doubtless full of sand and dirt, without paying the slightest heed to the dresses of the ladies that he was barging into. He drew behind him a trail of disapproving comments and severe pedagogical glances, just as the dust of the street hangs in the air when a car has driven past. The boy was aware of none of this. He couldn’t find his mother, and had a terrible outrage to complain to her about, so he yelled at the top of his little lungs.
‘Mamme!’ yelled the little boy. ‘Mamme!’
Chanele handed Janki the parasol on which he had insisted, pulled her arm out from his as one pulls a thread from a needle, and left him standing. Her laced ankle-boots were made for elegant promenading; it was not so easy to reach the other side of the audience quickly enough. She was watched with looks of disapproval; this must have been the unfortunate mother who was incapable of keeping her child under seemly control.
The little boy came shooting out of the rows of seats headfirst; he must have tripped over a slyly extended parasol, or even over his own feet. He had lost his spade, but he didn’t care, he just wanted to be hugged and hidden and comforted.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Chanele.
‘I want to be a soldier too!’ the boy wailed. He said it in Yiddish, of exactly the same hue that Chanele knew from her son-in-law Zalman.
With a ching of the Turkish crescent and a boom of the kettledrum the music started up again, and the sound seemed to make the boy so miserable that he buried his tear-stained face in Chanele’s dress and clung to her desperately with his hands. She would never get the stains out of that delicate crépon.
Chanele bent down to him and picked him up with the sure grip of a woman who has consoled many children and grandchildren in the past. The boy’s hair smelt of sun and sand, and Chanele couldn’t help hugging him. ‘Hush now,’ she whispered to him, ‘hush now. We’ll find your Mamme.’
It had all happened so quickly that Janki didn’t know whether he should go running after his wife or wait for her exactly where he was. A voice with a Southern German inflection relieved him of the decision. It addressed him with such noisy cordiality that some of the spa guests looked around disapprovingly for the source of this new disturbance.
‘There you are, Meijer,’ roared Staudinger. ‘Where have you been hiding yourself all this time? I would like to introduce you to a few comrades.’ If you’re holding a walking stick in one hand and a parasol in the other, it’s hard to lift your hat as form decrees. The four men who accompanied Staudinger didn’t seem to be bothered by this. They had just emerged from an early drinking session that had carried on over lunch, and cared nothing for formalities. They clapped Janki on the shoulder and shook him, regardless of walking stick and parasol, by the hand. One of the men, as awkwardly as if he had copied his movements from the drilling children, presented his hiking stick, covered with little metal crests, with great military precision, and they all talked over each other so excitedly that Janki couldn’t even hear the names by which they introduced themselves. The man with the hiking stick, that much he understood, had even mentioned an aristocratic title.
They insisted that Janki accompany them to the Strandcafé, where the beer was particularly good, straight away and with no dawdling, because drinking, they thought, was like artillery fire – it was only when you stopped that things got dangerous, ha! They put him in the middle, and no one who met the group on the way to the café really knew whether someone was being flanked by a guard of honour or led away as a criminal.
They drank beer. Janki’s suggestion that he celebrate their encounter by buying a good bottle of wine or even champagne was laughed at like a good joke, absolutely mind-boggling, but then he was a Frenchman, they said, so allowances had to be made. But they recommended that he abandon such dandified cravings forthwith, lest they find themselves forced to resume hostilities.
‘Ha!’ said Staudinger.
Janki laughed with them. He would have laughed at anything, so happy was he to be included in this company, of which one member even had an aristocratic title.
Staudinger, whose scar had been turned bright red by the sun or by the beer, must have described the encounter in the train to Hoyerschleuse in all its details to his four colleagues, and he exaggerated proficiently. He had clearly turned Janki into a Gallic hero fighting with courage born of desperation, who might have turned around the fortunes of the Battle of Sedan single-handedly, had a bullet not struck him in the leg and injured him with potentially fatal results. He did not necessarily wish to assert that this bullet actually came from the ranks of Staudinger’s Second Battalion, but it was still a possibility, which was why the two men – a soldier is a soldier, regardless of which side he is fighting on – were linked by a kind of mystic blood-brotherhood, which had to be celebrated at all costs, and to which glasses must be raised.
They celebrated, and they raised the glasses.
Janki, who wasn’t used to beer, couldn’t hear everything that the comrades told him, only that all five of them, albeit in different units, had been at the Battle of Sedan, that they had met much later at a Sedan Day celebration on Sylt, and had decided henceforth to meet in the same place every year and commemorate the day together, as a kind of veterans’ reunion or even just as a men’s group outing, ‘any excuse to leave the old woman at home, I bet you feel exactly the same, don’t you, chum?’
&nbs
p; They were by now on first-name terms, they had solemnly included Janki in their circle in a drunken ceremony in which Chanele’s parasol had to stand in for the sword in the dubbing ritual, and when they walked him back to the Atlantic they all had their arms around each other’s shoulders, out of comradeliness as much as a lack of balance, and together they sang the song about an old comrade, and how you’ll never find a better one.
Janki had left the parasol in the Strandcafé.
Even though it would soon be evening, hence time to change for the table d’hôte, Chanele wasn’t yet back at the hotel. While Janki was learning to drain a glass of beer without setting it down, she had found the little boy’s mother.
‘Your dress,’ was the first thing the woman had said, ‘for heaven’s sake, your beautiful dress! Motti, what have you been up to this time?’ And then she had been very relieved that Chanele hadn’t been looking for her because of the stain on her dress, but because it was high time the little boy was finally, finally able to wail out his woes.
Melnitz Page 46
