Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

They had then — ‘And like idiots we put up with it, at least on the first day’ — taken all the steaming hay-bales that the exhausted soldiers had torn apart to make a comfortable camp for themselves, and requisitioned them for themselves, straw for the troops, hay for the horses, and had even ridden out in the first few weeks, had straightened their backs and held their reins loosely between two gloved fingers, but then the hay had started running out, not to mention the oats, and at last the horses had only stood there, in stables where that was possible, but also just under the open sky, tied in long rows; attempts had been made to light big fires to warm them a little, but the smoke had only made them restless and bad-tempered.

‘There are some lovely animals among them,’ said Janki, ‘particularly the officers’ private horses, but most of them are of course luggage pullers, dray and coach horses, and you’re not going to win a show-jumping competition with those, but you might be able to drag a cannon out of the dirt. Hundreds of horses. Fodder for butchers.’

‘Well?’ said Salomon, and packed into that one syllable was a whole droosh, a sermon interpreting the verse of the scripture: ‘You shouldn’t tell a beheimes dealer, who’s only interested in cows, anything about horses.’

‘Now comes the bit that no one knows yet,’ said Janki and took Salomon by the sleeve, an intimacy that not even Golde allowed herself. ‘It’s to be a secret for as long as possible, so that no one does a private deal with it. But this schoolmaster disguised as a soldier gave the game away to me. They decided to sell all the French horses to pay for part of the expense of the detention. There’s going to be a big auction, in Saignelégier.’

‘So?’

Janki stared at Salomon, amazed and sympathetic, the way you might look at someone who’s been asked a riddle and is still looking for the solution even though it’s staring him right in the face. ‘“So?” you ask? There will be so many horses on the market that prices in Switzerland are bound to collapse. They’ll be so eager that they’ll carry the animals to our door, as long as we buy them.’

‘We won’t buy them.’

‘Yes, we will. After we’ve sold them.’

And then he described his plan to Salomon again, the plan he had hatched in the internment camp, he Janki Meijer, all by himself, the only thinking person amongst defeated, apathetic time-servers, the plan that had given him strength on his long march through Switzerland, that had warmed him in a stinking kennel, that had drawn him from his fever as if on a rope, because there was no time to lose, not a single day, because the opportunity was there now and it wouldn’t come back.

They would sell horsemeat to a butcher, ideally to master butcher Gubser, with whom Salomon would have made an agreement to sell horsemeat, on contract, due in one month, one hundred kilos, two hundred, five hundred, what did Janki know, as much as Gubser would take from them, they would offer him a price so cheap that he would think they’d gone meshuga, a metsiya that no one could resist, certainly not a goyish butcher, because, as Janki remembered from the pub in Guebwiller they were always prepared to pull a fast one. But when the contract came due and the meat had to be supplied, the prices for horses would have dropped to their lowest ever, the butcher would be furious — ‘But is that our problem?’ — and they would make a reyvech, enough to set up as a tailor or a cloth-dealer or whatever you liked. Janki was so sure of his argument that he dared to parody the cattle-trader, whose support he after all relied on, with comical distortions.

‘So?’ asked Janki.

Salomon Meijer stroked his sideburn. ‘A good sign,’ thought Janki, who didn’t know him. Salomon looked thoughtfully down the hill, at the stable less than two hundred yards away, where they were already waiting for him, then he rammed his umbrella into the soft soil, so that it seemed to stand all by itself, Moses’ rod before the Pharaoh. He leaned against a tree, as Rav Bodenheimer sometimes leaned against the bookshelf when he began to explain something in a lesson, and said, ‘Look at this umbrella!’

‘The umbrella?’

‘I always keep it with me, and I never put it up. Why?’

Janki helplessly spread his arms. He had no idea what Salomon was getting at.

‘It’s a mark. Something striking. Something that distinguishes me from all other Jews who deal with beheimes. Just as the pot in which I cook something in the inn when I have to stay there overnight, differs from all other pots. Because I make a mark on it. Three letters, a kaf, a shin and a resh, inside on the bottom. The word “kosher”. If the letters are still there next time I know: I can use the pot. You understand?’

Janki didn’t understand at all. How did they get from the horses to an umbrella and from the umbrella to a pot?

Salomon wouldn’t be hurried. He finished his thoughts as slowly and carefully as the Rav did when he put two distant quotations together to clarify a disputed passage. ‘I have assumed the habit of the umbrella so that people know who I am. The Jew with the brolly. The way you brand a mark on a horse’s rump, if you want to talk about horses. It’s been stolen from me twice, because there’s a rumour among the farm boys that it’s the place,’ and he pointed to the belly of the umbrella, where the black fabric swelled in the gentle spring breeze, ‘in which I keep my money. Nu, let them steal it. What does such an umbrella cost? I have three more like it at home.’ When Salomon laughed he kept his lips closed, and his cheeks with their little red veins went round like two apple halves.

‘I’m the Jew with the brolly. And people know: this Jew is honest. This Jew doesn’t cheat. We can rely on the Jew. Not that I give them presents. Then they would say: the Jew is stupid. If they leave a cow that I’m supposed to buy unmilked in the byre for two days, so that the udder looks firmer, then I laugh at them. But it must be exactly the same the other way around. If they come to the Jew with the brolly for the milk cow and want to check the rings on the horn to see how often she has calved before, the horns aren’t filed down. A beef bullock that someone buys from me won’t have thirsted at the salt lick and then greedily drunk its fill of water, so that it weighs a few pounds more on the scales. People know that, and that’s why they do their deals with me and not with anyone else. That’s how I live, that’s my parnooseh. And because that’s the case, and because that’s how it’s going to stay…’

‘But it’s a unique opportunity,’ Janki said pleadingly, knowing that he had lost the argument.

‘Because it’s how it’s to stay,’ Salomon went on, ‘I will not sell butcher Gubser horsemeat on a contract that will only mean he loses money. Have I made a name for myself for all these years, only to buy it from me for a few gold pieces and then throw it away?’ He pulled the tip of the umbrella out of the muddy ground with a quiet thwock and then went down the hill towards the byre, sticking the umbrella into the ground with every second step, as if to mark a boundary line.

There was something of the parson about master butcher Gubser, an unctuous tone that made him popular with the housewives who bought from his shop. He had the habit of repeating words that he didn’t mean two or three times, putting his fleshy red hand on his heart as if making an oath before a court.

‘Ah, the new relation,’ he said, and half-bowed to Janki. ‘I’ve heard of him. Welcome, welcome, welcome. A cattle trader too?’

‘A businessman too,’ replied Janki, and Salomon inflated his cheeks with his lips closed.

‘From France, I hear. Been at the Battle of Sedan. Must have been terrible. Terrible.’