Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Contrary to Mimi’s expectations, Désirée showed no sign of seeking her forgiveness or consolation. Quite the reverse: it was as if they had swapped roles, and now Désirée, as the adult, had to overlook some of her mother’s immature behaviour. Her whole life long Mimi had preserved the egocentricity and whining tones of a little girl; Désirée had grown up almost overnight.

  Pinchas was not unhappy with the change in his daughter. He had been worried about her, and now comforted himself with the thought that with her increasing maturity she would soon see what a pointless flirtation she had wandered into; one only had to give things time. At first one could be pleased that she was developing very new interests and was no longer content simply to tick off the social diary of a daughter of the affluent middle classes.

  Désirée even tried to make herself useful around the house, although that only led to difficulties. Mimi’s maids, if they didn’t leave the house at the first possible opportunity, very quickly developed a high degree of independence. Every now and again they stoically endured a monologue from the mistress of the house, but they were also well organised, and Désirée’s sudden interest in household matters was perceived as bothersome spying. Mimi too didn’t really think it appropriate for a daughter from a good house to be bustling around in the kitchen, and even trying to join in with the cleaning. She herself liked to complain how exhausting it was running a household – Pinchas had no idea! – but she preferred to leave these things to others. The current holder of the post was very efficient, and Mimi did not want to give her cause for complaint under any circumstances.

  So it was that Désirée sought a new field of activity in Pinchas’s shop. He had only a single employee, one Frau Okun, whom Zalman had once sent him with the request to do something for her. Frau Okun, a young widow, had fled from Russia in dramatic circumstances, and liked to talk in a quavering voice about the persecutions that one had to endure there as a Jew. She was extremely efficient, but treated the customers in a very unfriendly manner. Having grown up in a country where shortages prevailed, she could not be dissuaded from the conviction that customers were basically only supplicants. So there were repeated complaints, and anyone else would have sacked her long ago. Pinchas saw it as a mitzvah to keep her busy, but he was also to some extent happy to use the opportunity to move her from the front to the backroom. So Frau Okun filled bottles up with sweet wine from Palestine in the cellar, pulling the lever of the corking machine with such force that the dull blows could be heard even in the shop. Désirée stood behind the counter wearing a white apron, selling red horseradish coloured with beetroot, or strictly kosher chocolate produced under supervision.

  She never mentioned Alfred, which Pinchas, who knew more about the Talmud than he did about psychology, took as a good sign. Alfred’s letters, which Mimi always censored, as she had threatened to do, became duller each time and often contained nothing more than the dutiful greetings one fills the back of postcards with in the summer holidays. ‘You’ll see: the affair will die down,’ Pinchas said optimistically, and Mimi herself already believed that the idea of the cooling-off period and the traineeship in Paris had actually come from her.

  They were both mistaken. Désirée, who had to ask permission every single time she went out – very much to the satisfaction of Lea and Rachel, who had to endure the same thing – met Aunt Mina at the tea-room of the Huguenin restaurant once a week. Mimi would have liked to forbid even that; Mina was François’s wife and thus on the side of the enemy. But again Pinchas would hear nothing of it. He felt sorry for Mina. After everything she had had to put up with in her life, now her son had been taken away on top of everything.

  The Huguenin was a very respectable place with many Jewish customers. In the summer, when the days were long, one could even sit there on Shabbos afternoon, although of course without money in one’s pocket, which would have been forbidden. One went back on Sunday to pay the previous day’s bill. None the less, the suspicious Mimi checked with a few friends who also went there that it really was Mina there with whom Désirée drank her hot chocolate. One never knew.

  There was one thing that her spies didn’t tell her, because they didn’t notice: the two women did more than just talk about Alfred. Mina also brought Désirée his real letters, which he sent to a box at the main Post Office, and which she collected there for her daughter-in-law. Yes, daughter-in-law. Mina, few of whose wishes life had fulfilled, considered Alfred’s baptism as something like her own polio, a misfortune about which the boy could do nothing, and was firmly resolved that it wouldn’t stop him from being happy in exactly the way he wished to be. It was the first time in her life that she wasn’t just an onlooker and a listener, and to her own surprise she enjoyed the conspiracy, a model pupil carrying out all the pranks she had missed in her obedient school days, all at once.

  Alfred’s real letters did not consist of empty postcard phrases. They were, if one wished to apply literary standards to them, even quite overblown. He described his life in Paris as nothing but endless waiting; when he went to the museum at the weekend, he saw only Désirée’s face in every portrait, and he asked every cloud that drifted eastwards over the city to carry greetings with it. If one is young, in love and parted, one isn’t very troubled by kitsch.

  Désirée read the letters so often that she knew whole passages by heart. She kept the precious pages in the shop, in a drawer full of bonbons that Pinchas had once ordered in large quantities, but which no one wanted to buy. The paper soon assumed a sweetish scent, as if Alfred’s emotional phrases smelled of almonds and rosewater all by themselves. Désirée even took the perfume home with her; in the drawer of her bedside table there was a handful of the sweets, and when she opened the drawer and closed her eyes she felt Alfred quite close to her.

  In her diary, which she kept only because she knew very well that Mimi would read it in secret, she wrote, by way of disguise, apparently disappointed sentences like: ‘Alfred seems to cool towards me,’ or reminded herself to work harder on her French conjugations. The conjugation she meant had been in Alfred’s last letter: ‘Je te desire, tu me desires, nous nous désirons.’ Mimi had, without knowing it, given her exactly the right name.

  François also kept himself discreetly informed. His business friend was able to tell him about an industrious, serious young man, who showed a great talent for department stores. ‘One can tell all that he has learned from you,’ wrote Monsieur Charpentier. He hoped to be able to do a lot of business with François in future, and was therefore not sparing with his compliments. To François’s regret he could tell him nothing about love affairs, even though, as Monsieur Charpentier flatteringly wrote, Alfred was a very good-looking young man, whose good future one could see at first glance. ‘At this age fidelity doesn’t last long,’ François consoled himself. ‘Something is bound to happen.’

  People didn’t come to Pinchas’s shop just for the kosher food; it was also a place where one was bound to meet – and this was at least as important to many of the lady customers – someone who knew the latest gossip from both communities. The stories that appeared in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt on a Friday had already been discussed long ago in the shop, and in fact many articles signed ‘pp’ had only come into being because Pinchas, a freelance worker for the ‘rag’, had kept his ears open while filling bags with flour or sugar. Even the better sort of lady, who liked to send their maids to do the shopping, liked to drop by in person to discuss marriage prospects, exchange sickness reports or just have a good ruddel. Frau Okun, with her brusque, impatient manner, had often spoiled the fun of these cosy chats; Désirée, the ladies were delighted to note, was quite different in this respect. As her thoughts were mostly far away, she was in no hurry to take their money, and didn’t get involved in their conversations, which won her the reputation of being a very sensible and intelligent girl.

  Male customers seldom came. Only old bachelors or widowers dropped in every now and again, to buy the meagre portions th
at they then prepared on their gas cookers at home. Young men attracted attention here, particularly when one of them turned up on a regular basis and seemed not to know what he actually wanted to buy. He hadn’t just happened to be in the neighbourhood, either, the well-informed ladies observed, he worked in a stationery shop on Schaffhauserplatz, and it was a good half-hour’s walk from there to Pinchas’s kosher shop. And besides – the ladies had not only keen eyes, but also good noses – he always arrived smelling of freshly applied eau de Cologne, which was an unambiguous sign in young men. ‘He is interested in Mimi’s daughter,’ the rumour soon circulated, and everyone waited to see when and how the young man would make his first step.

  Désirée was probably the only one who heard nothing about these speculations. Two months of the long year had already passed, and Alfred’s letters were stacking up in the drawer with the sweet bonbons.

  Mimi, on the other hand, knew all about it – what are friends for? – and immediately started making investigations. Not that she wanted to get involved, certainement pas, that really wasn’t her style, but as a mother one was obliged to know, above all since Pinchas, like all men, was terribly naïve in these matters. He hadn’t even been aware of the affair with Alfred.

  The young man’s family, she had soon discovered, was not ‘one of our people’, which meant that he didn’t come from Endingen or Lengnau but had, a few years before the big wave of Russian refugees, come from the East. Mimi was proud of her tolerance in these matters, and even Eastern Jews – pourquoi pas? – could be very respectable people. The parents belonged neither to the religious community nor to the Orthodox Community, but visited a ‘schtiebel’, a kind of private prayer circle, where religious service was performed according to Hassidic custom, and where, above all at Simchas Torah, there was a lot of wild, exotic singing and dancing. The son, however – an only son, incidentally – had adapted very well to Zurich manners, and was even a member of the gymnastics society. So what could be more obvious than to invite Arthur to dinner and then ask him a few questions afterwards?

  ‘I wouldn’t mind’, said Mimi, after she had reassured herself that Désirée was in her room and couldn’t hear anything, ‘such a kosher admirer. The child needs a distraction. What do you think, Pinchas?’

  ‘He has never said a word to suggest that he is interested in Désirée.’

  ‘What do you expect? That he should buy a mitzvah and then wait until he is called upon? He was in the shop five times over the last three weeks. Cinq fois!’ she repeated, as if the number were much more imposing in French.

  ‘And? Frau Wyler comes five times a day.’

  Mimi waved her hands in despair. ‘Tell me, Arthur, are all men so helpless?’

  ‘It also seems to me that you’re reading a bit much into the situation.’

  ‘Bella Feldmann once saw him standing by the shop window for a quarter of an hour. And you’re not going to claim that there’s much to see there!’

  Pinchas chose to say nothing on the subject. He had already had heated discussions with Mimi about his shop window. He was of the opinion that the customers already knew what they wanted to buy from him all by themselves, while Mimi dreamed of artistic arrangements of soaps based on the Tower of Babel, or the outlines of a Hanukkah candlestick in white and brown beans. She took Pinchas’s silence for resignation and returned to Arthur.

  ‘You could tell us a bit about the young man, I think. He’s in the gymnastics association as well, and you know everybody there.’ She looked at him so expectantly that Arthur couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘You would make the job much easier for me, my dear Mimi, if you could tell me his name.’

  ‘His name is Leibowitz. Jonathan Leibowitz. But everyone calls him Joni.’

  The night was cold. A biting wind that heralded winter had cleared the streets, and the few people who were still out and about preferred to switch pavements rather than pass one another, as if everyone but themselves must be up to no good if they weren’t at home in a warm flat in such weather.

  Arthur hadn’t buttoned up his coat, and felt the cold like a hot iron. The wind blew the first fine particles of ice, sharp needles that hit his face. Just not hard enough.

  Not hard enough.

  He had given no reaction, just taking his glasses off and rubbing the bridge of his nose, and then talked about Joni Leibowitz, as if he were struggling to remember the name. Yes, yes, he was quite a respectable young man, at least nothing negative was known about him, his father worked as a cobbler, he believed, and his mother brought in a little extra money with embroidery. He and Joni had even trained together at one point and in fact, now that Pinchas said it, it occurred to him again, they had once fought in a competition, he couldn’t quite remember who had won. Joni had still been a boy at the time, no more than seventeen or eighteen. Was he now actually old enough to . . .? Well, why not. It was a long time since they had seen one another and – ‘I’m sorry, Mimi’ – he couldn’t tell her much more about him. Joni was no longer active in the gymnastics association, and they had lost contact long ago.

  They had lost contact.

  Somehow, without noticing, he had reached the riverside facilities. Thick clouds covered the moon, and the water, sheltered from the wind by the Engen harbour mole, could be neither seen nor heard. A few lights shone on the other side of the lake, but before that the darkness was like an abyss. The chain of a ship rattled.

  ‘One should really jump in,’ Arthur thought, and knew that he would never do anything so final.

  And he had no reason to, either. No reason at all.

  The affair was long over.

  No, thought Arthur, nothing dramatic would happen, the world would go on turning, he would go on doing his work, he would remain friendly, helpful Dr Meijer, he would go on explaining to the young people in the gymnastics association how to warm up their muscles before training and then to relax them again, somehow he would drum up the money for the association flag, and if Joni came to the flag consecration ceremony, they would say hello, friendly and detached.

  Nothing dramatic would happen.

  If Mimi was right in her assumption and Joni was interested in Désirée, he wouldn’t get involved. Perhaps she would forget Alfred, perhaps she wouldn’t, ‘love is not something that lasts,’ Arthur thought, and if what had to happen happened, he would go on playing his part, he would be the kind uncle who sends an original present for the engagement and a tasteful one for the wedding. Eventually the family would stop wondering why he didn’t have a family himself, even the most eager matchmakers would stop coming up with shidduchim for him, he would have found his place, he would just be harmless, slightly odd Uncle Arthur, and eventually he would be as old as he had always seemed to himself.

  Nothing dramatic.

  With a sudden movement he slung his hat in the water. A quiet splash, then all was still again.

  49

  The entrance to the offices, François had explained to him on the telephone, must be in the bed-linen department on the second floor, somewhere among the shelves full of dressing table accessories, guest towels and wall coverings on which the predetermined legend ‘hard work brings blessings’ had yet to be embroidered. In the end, Arthur asked a salesgirl the way, and she showed him the little door, which bore no sign. He had walked past three times without noticing it.

  When one stepped through this door, one suddenly found oneself in a quite different world. In the spaces meant for the public, François’s department store had something of the brilliance of a stage set, a superficial magnificence that was supposed to give the customer the feeling of being one of those lucky people for whom a few rappen or even francs make little difference. Behind the door everything was bare and matter-of-fact. One was welcomed by the musty smell of a room that no one took the time to air, like a lackey switching back from the staterooms to the servants’ passageway.

  The door wasn’t locked, but when it opened it bumped against an obstruction: ri
ght behind it, in a narrow corridor, was an old sofa, as if temporarily dumped there by removal men during a move and then never picked up again. The man sitting on it seemed to have been forgotten as well. He had fallen asleep in an uncomfortable seated position, his head sunk on his chest, and presented the visitor with the pimples on his reddened nape. It was only the uniform cap lying next to him on the seat that reminded Arthur where he had seen the man before: he was the chauffeur whom François seemed to hate for some reason, and yet never sacked. Landolt snored quietly. He was probably waiting here for his next assignment.

  The doors on either side of the passageway bore no inscriptions, and through the little frosted-glass panes it was impossible to tell what lay behind them. Arthur stopped indecisively until one of them opened directly behind him. A woman with a severe hairstyle – ‘I am something important,’ her facial expression said – came out and looked suspiciously at Arthur. Her buttoned-up black satin blouse had a collar that reached up to her chin, so tight that her eyes bulged slightly. ‘Or perhaps she just has a slight case of Basedow,’ thought the doctor in Arthur.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the lady. Her tone left no doubt that if it was up to her no one around here would be helped at all.

  ‘I’m looking for François,’ said Arthur and corrected himself straight away under her disapproving governess gaze: ‘Herr Meijer, I mean. I’m his brother.’

  She looked at him as dubiously as if every day she had to deal with con men, claiming some kind of family relationship in order to trick their way into the chief executive’s holy of holies.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ she asked.

  ‘I have an appointment.’

  ‘Then follow me.’ She had the ability to turn even apparently polite sentences into accusations just with the tone of her voice.

  ‘So, how do you like my Cerberus?’ asked François when the two brothers were alone.