Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘There are nicer places to be than battlefields,’ said Janki, and Gubser laughed as loudly and heartily as if he had never heard a more polished bon mot.

‘Brilliant,’ he said, ‘brilliant, brilliant. But then you Jews have a way with words. That’s why one has to take such care when one’s doing business with you. But Herr Meijer knows I’m not blaming you. Everyone’s as God has made him. A calf isn’t a sheep, and a pig isn’t a goat.’

Salomon, resting his hands on the handle of his umbrella, seemed to be counting the empty swallows’ nests under the roof truss of the byre.

‘Today I need a cow,’ said Gubser. ‘A cheap cow with a lot of meat on its bones. Could even be old and tough. Sausages are sausages, whatever you put in them.’ He laughed loud and long, and when Janki didn’t join in with his laughter, he asked, ‘Didn’t he understand that, this Frenchman of yours?’

‘Doesn’t he understand me, or doesn’t he want to understand me?’ Salomon said to Golde a weeks later. ‘I ask him how he imagines his future, and he just looks at me and shrugs his shoulders and goes for a walk.’

‘He needs to recover. He has been ill, and has to do something for his health.’ Golde’s voice sounded muted, because her head was in the big cupboard in the bedroom, as if in a cave. Crouching on the floor, she was fishing from the very back corner all the things that you never throw away, and only ever pick up at the Pesach cleaning. She held out to her husband a shard of painted porcelain, part of the plate that had been broken and distributed almost twenty-five years ago on the day of their engagement, and they exchanged a smile as one can only smile after long years of marriage, assembled from equal parts of contented memory and almost-as-contented resignation.

‘Still,’ said Salomon. He helped Golde to her feet and tried not to remember how much lighter in body and soul she once had been. ‘He runs around the place, you never know where he’s going next, and if you want to exchange a word with him he doesn’t listen.’

‘He’s young,’ said Golde. ‘And he’s disappointed, it seems to me. What sort of business deal did he suggest to you?’

‘Not a clean one.’ Business deals were men’s affair. Salomon didn’t ask Golde why all the handleless cups and cracked glasses had to be cleaned so thoroughly once a year, only to gather dust again for twelve months in the bottom drawer. ‘I couldn’t go along with it. But that’s no reason to go walking around the world all on your own. People are talking.’

Golde filled her apron with cutlery, a peasant woman collecting pears in the autumn. She chewed on her lower lip, firmly resolved not to tell her husband, who always thought he knew everything and yet didn’t understand a thing, a word of what people were really saying. But then, already half way out of the room, he was stronger than she was. She turned around again and said, ‘He’s not always alone.’

‘My real name is Miriam,’ Mimi had said. ‘They call me Mimi because they treat me like a child. But I’m not a child any more.’

‘No,’ Janki had replied, ‘you’re not a child any more.’ And he had looked at her with a look, ‘with a look’, Mimi had told the schoolmaster’s daughter the same day, ‘that would make you blush if he wasn’t a relative.’

The friendship between the two young women went back to their childhood days. They had splashed together in the shallow water when they were still too little to understand that while they might have belonged to the same village they actually lived in different worlds. Anne-Kathrin had also played an important part in the episode with the rescued kitten; she had brought along the long-handled net that her father always took fishing, in the hope, never fulfilled, that the big, the really big pike would fall into his clutches. Now the two of them only ever met in secret, not because anyone frowned upon, or even prohibited, their having contact with one another, but because that secrecy had a charm of its own. A lock on a diary lends value to even the most trivial confession.

‘He has eyes…’ said Mimi. ‘Very long eyelashes that stroke his cheeks. And then when he opens them…’ She stretched her body as the kitten had once done when you stroked it behind its ears, and even the sound she made as she did so was like a miaow.

‘You’re in love,’ said Anne-Kathrin, and was quite envious.

Mimi denied this with the vehemence of a guilty defendant. ‘And most importantly, he is my cousin.’

‘A very distant one.’

‘Yes,’ said Mimi and stretched her body again. ‘Very distant.’

‘My real name is Miriam,’ she had said to him, and he had replied, not in Yiddish but in French for once, ‘ C’est dommage .’

Miriams, he had explained, were as numerous as the sequins on a ball gown, one more, one less, what did it matter? But Mimi, ah, he had only ever met one Mimi before, or rather: not really met, he had only read about her, in a novel, but even then he had thought: that is a very special name, and the person who bears it must be very special too.

‘And he is in love with you !’ When Anne-Kathrin was excited, her voice rose to a squeal. A pigeon flew up in alarm, and the two girls laughed at the silly bird as at that moment they would probably have laughed or cried over anything at all.

They were sitting in the round gazebo that Anne-Kathrin’s father the schoolmaster, who placed great importance on being out in the open, had had built at the end of his garden. To get to it, you had to pass through the whole of the long garden, past all the flowerbeds that were fading away, bare and unused, at this time of year. The schoolmaster had only planted a few onions; he received his potatoes from the council, even though some people wanted to abolish this tribute on the grounds that it was old-fashioned. The flower beds were separated off by a row of rosebushes, and a big branch of an elder bush also obstructed the view. It was precisely because the gazebo was in seemingly such plain view that it was in fact an ideal hiding place.

‘He wants to get hold of the book. He wants to go all the way to Baden, he says, just to find it for me. Even though he hates such journeys, because he had to do so much marching as a soldier.’

Anne-Kathrin brought the ends of her long blonde braids together in front of her nose and squinted slightly. ‘Like a knight’, she said softly, ‘setting off to find a treasure.’ She really wanted to say ‘the Holy Grail’, but she didn’t think that was appropriate in the context of Mimi.

‘And he wants to read it to me. We just have to find a suitable spot for it. Everything’s upside down in our house at the moment, if only Pesach weren’t coming up… My parents, you know.’

Of course Anne-Kathrin offered her friend the gazebo for her rendezvous. The adventures of others, when you have helped to set them up, are almost like your own.

‘Mimi was a fille charmante ,’ Janki read, translating word for word into Yiddish and sometimes, if the right expression refused to come, simply in French. ‘She was nineteen years old’ — it said ‘twenty-two’ in the book, but as his listener was nineteen, the little change seemed appropriate — ‘small, delicate and self-confident. Her face was like a preliminary sketch for the portrait of an aristocrat, but her features, delicate in their outlines and, it seemed, gently illuminated by the radiance of her clear blue eyes…’

‘Anne-Kathrin has blue eyes,’ thought Mimi, ‘but she isn’t an aristocrat. Certainly not an aristocrat.’

‘… but her features,’ repeated Janki, who had got lost in the novel’s meandering sentences, ‘sometimes showed, when she was tired or in a bad mood, an expression of almost wild brutality.’