Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘He’s gone already,’ said Mimi, and was prepared to take her weeping daughter comfortingly in her arms. But Désirée just nodded silently as if the news had no particular importance for her.

Mimi had undertaken to spend a lot of time with her daughter now. ‘After all,’ she often said to Pinchas, ‘it’s all my fault and mine alone. I have paid too little heed to Désirée, and am a very bad mother!’ Pinchas then contradicted her, and that comforting contradiction, they both knew, was the true purpose of her self-reproach.

Although Mimi repeatedly stressed that she, in the goodness of her heart, was entirely willing to forgive and forget, the old friendly intimacy between mother and daughter did not reappear. When Désirée had confided her secret adventures to her every day, even though she did so under the pretext that it had all happened to her best friend, they had got on better. She was now forbidden to see Esther Weill, much to the amazement of Esther’s parents. But if one didn’t want to be the talk of the whole community, one couldn’t let anyone in on the whole sorry story.

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.’