Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘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.

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.