Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Just behind the gazebo there ran a hedge in which Anne-Kathrin had, while still a schoolgirl, discovered a gap, which she had for various reasons repeatedly extended. You could force your way through there, to a narrow path that led to the river, and if you didn’t forget to dab off telltale burrs from your dress, no one could guess how you’d got there.

Janki had flicked on through the book and was now translating a passage in which Rodolphe’s enthusiastic eloquence ‘by turns tender, stirring and melancholy’ gradually won his Mimi over to him. ‘She felt’, Janki read, ‘the ice of apathy that had for so long kept her heart unfeeling, melting from his love. Then she threw herself at his chest and told him with kisses what she couldn’t say with words.’ He fell silent, and Mimi, whose head, she didn’t know how, had leant against his shoulder, made an impatient mewling noise.

‘ L’aurore — how do you say aurore ?’ asked Janki.

‘Sunrise,’ Mimi replied, and had to repeat the word several times. ‘Sunrise.’

‘Sunrise surprised them in a close embrace, eye to eye, hand in hand, and their moist, ardent lips…’

It had, Mimi later said to Anne-Kathrin, really just been a fly, a fly far too early for the season, that had landed on her nose and startled her, just a desire to get rid of it and shake it off and if her lips had touched Janki’s mouth for a moment, had brushed against it only for a fragment of a second, it hadn’t been intentional, certainement pas and he had, unlike a young man from the village would have done, reacted like a cavalier, which is to say not at all, he had acted as if he hadn’t noticed anything, as if nothing at all had happened, and in truth nothing had happened, said Mimi to Anne-Kathrin, nothing at all, they had read a book together, that must surely be allowed, although her mother was always telling her off for her love of literature; if it was up to her, you were just supposed to waste away as a young girl.

Anne-Kathrin agreed and asked her to give a very detailed account of what hadn’t happened, how Mimi had said ‘Pardon!’ quite calmly and coolly, as you do when you accidentally get too close to someone in the market, how Janki had only nodded, but how his eyes, those big, expressive eyes, had looked at Mimi — ‘like when someone’s thirsty, you understand?’ — and Anne-Kathrin understood very well and wanted to hear the whole story all over again, just to be able to confirm to Mimi that it hadn’t been a kiss, very definitely not a kiss.

Janki didn’t read the sentence he had begun all the way to the end. He even left the book in the gazebo, and Anne-Kathrin later had to hide it under the pillow in her room. On the way home he walked beside Mimi like a stranger, a cousin beside a cousin that he doesn’t know any more than that. For a moment Golde had the impression they had had an argument, but she forgot the thought again straight away, because she was much more preoccupied with another matter: master butcher Gubser urgently wanted to talk to Salomon, and Salomon had no idea what it might be about.

When Salomon arrived at Gubser’s house, the butcher was still at dinner. His wife, an angular person who had developed a mechanical precision in her movements from cutting sausages and weighing slices, opened the door to the dining room for him, where Gubser and three red-faced sons were bent over their plates. All four looked up only briefly, as they would have looked up briefly from their hymn books if someone had tried to push their way along the pew. Gubser was first to finish his dinner, wiped up the sauce with a piece of bread and then said, still chewing, ‘Ah, Herr Meijer! What a delightful surprise! Can I offer you something? A slice of ham, perhaps?’

‘You wanted to talk to me, I’ve been told.’

‘I did? I can’t remember. But please sit down, my dear, dear Herr Meijer. Are you sure you won’t do us the honour of having a little something? No? But you will have a drop of wine. Erika, a glass for our guest!’

They weren’t playing the game for the first time. Master butcher Gubser knew very well that Salomon Meijer wasn’t permitted to eat anything or drink wine at his house, and his digs had no more meaning than the compliments that he added to the shopping of his lady customers like free soup-bones.

‘I don’t want to keep you for long,’ said Salomon. ‘I only came because I was told it was an urgent matter.’

‘Matter?’ Gubser repeated. He stretched the word out in a questioning tone as if he were hearing it for the first time. ‘What sort of matter would the two of us be…?’

‘Chanele says—’

‘Chanele?’ Gubser imitated Salomon’s singsong tone so convincingly that his three sons giggled into their plates. ‘Ah, the young lady who was so kind as to open the door to me. Quite pretty, if it weren’t for those eyebrows.’

‘She says you have something to give me.’

‘She must have misunderstood. Your people are supposed to be better at talking than listening, after all.’ The eldest Gubser son, who was in fact already an adult, laughed out loud, which his mother, without looking up, rewarded with an accurate clip around the ear.

‘Then please forgive me for troubling you.’ Salomon took the hat that he had been holding in his hand all that time and put it back on.

‘Not so fast, not so fast, dear Herr Meijer!’ Gubser wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat and got up. ‘Let’s go into the office. The boys don’t need to hear everything.’

The room that Gubser called his office was a cramped room with small windows that barely let in any light, because they were hung all over with tin-framed crests. On the table a paraffin lamp illuminated a muddle of bills and letters, the individual stacks weighed down with slaughtering knives and other butchers’ utensils. On one of the stacks there was a heavy brass ashtray. Gubser — he had to squeeze in between the table and a standing desk with lots of drawers — sat down in a high-backed chair with carved legs, which would have looked more at home in an old castle than in a butcher’s house, and pointed to a matching stool. ‘Please!’

‘I’d sooner stand, if you don’t mind.’

‘I do mind, my dear Herr Meijer. You lot must learn to make yourselves comfortable.’

Salomon sat down. As there was nowhere to put his hat, he hung it over the handle of his umbrella.

‘Yeeesss…’ Gubser leaned back in his chair, and hooked both thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. ‘A farmer,’ thought Salomon, ‘who has cattle for sale when everyone else has to buy. Someone who looks forward to haggling, because he will always win. He’ll be lighting a cigar next.’

‘You have one!’ said Gubser, holding out the wooden box. ‘Or is that forbidden too?’

‘It is permitted. But I don’t smoke. I take snuff.’

The lighting of the crude cigar was a laborious process. Gubser riffled through a packet of letters, chose one, rolled it firmly together, held it over the lamp and then, puffing away, twirled the cigar around above the burning paper. ‘Yeeesss,’ he said again, when the operation was finally concluded to his satisfaction, ‘then let us try and discover how this misunderstanding came about.’

‘You were at our house this afternoon…’

‘Of course, of course. But even given the politeness for which your people are rightly renowned, I would not have expected you to pay me a return visit the same time.’

‘You sent me a message…’

‘You?’ The butcher grinned like someone approaching the punchline when telling a joke. ‘Herr Meijer!’

Salomon stared at him uncomprehendingly.

‘Or should I say: Monsieur Meijer? What is he? A nephew, a cousin? You can never quite tell with you lot.’