Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘Janki?’ A cattle trader only does good business if you can’t see what he’s thinking. At that moment Salomon was a very bad cattle trader.

Gubser laughed loudly and complacently.

‘What do you want from Janki?’

The master butcher narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, produced a series of fat smoke rings and watched them slowly floating apart in the gloom. It was only then that he replied, ‘I don’t know if I’m permitted to tell you this. You wouldn’t be too pleased if other people knew about your business deals.’

Again Salomon gave no sign of his confusion. If someone wants to say something and is still playing coy, you will make him talk sooner with silence than with questions.

‘But on the other hand,’ Gubser said after a pause, ‘you are family. Or — what do you people call it? — mishpocha. All one mishpocha.’

Salomon still said nothing.

‘This Janki is a good man. Still very young, of course, but not stupid. Not stupid at all. He will go far. Above all he has a good nose… That’s not supposed to be a double entendre, my dear Herr Meijer not a double entendre, for heaven’s sake. You know that I would never mock the physical properties of other people. Never. He has a very good nose for the right people. A better one than you, if I can put it as directly as that.’

Salomon looked intently at a crest that showed half a red lily on the left and on the right a yellow field.

‘He came to me and made me a proposal. A rather surprising suggestion, but an illuminating one. That’s right, illuminating. It’s about horses. Horsemeat, to be precise.’

Salomon hid his surprise behind a cough and waved the cigar smoke irritably away.

‘He made you…?’

‘ You didn’t want to have me in the business, he told me. I don’t know why, when we have been working together, is this not so, dear Herr Meijer, so long and so well? You could easily have offered me the business with the contracts.’

The auction in Saignélegier, Salomon had known for two days, had taken place. So why was Gubser in such a good mood?

‘How much?’ asked Salomon, and his attempt to show nothing but harmlessly polite interest was not very successful, ‘How much did you buy from him?’

The butcher laughed so loudly that the cigar fell from his mouth, bounced off the bulge in his waistcoat and, spraying a little volcano of ash and ember, landed on one of the piles of papers. ‘Bought?’ he panted. The words bubbled up from his laughter, like gas bubbling from a bog. ‘I didn’t buy!’

It turned out that Janki, after meeting Gubser, had visited him in his shop later the same day and made the same proposal that Salomon had so vehemently rejected: selling horsemeat on contract and then, after the price drop that might be expected, stocking up again much more cheaply. He didn’t yet have any contacts here, he had explained, so he needed a partner familiar with the branch. He was prepared to put some of his money at risk, and he had brought his capital with him — ‘knotted in a handkerchief, as gypsies do’. He had wanted to go fifty-fifty, but Gubser — ‘We’ve learned Jewish ways from you’ — had bargained him down to seventy-thirty; in the end he, the butcher, had had to do all the work. ‘ And earned the wrath of my colleagues.’ It hadn’t been hard to find takers, and even easier for Gubser than it would have been for Salomon. He had claimed that he had speculated with his purchases, and now that temperatures had suddenly become so mild, the ice he needed for refrigeration was costing him a fortune. He had sold a lot, and impressed on each buyer that he was to discuss it with no one. ‘And they won’t, now that they’ve fallen for it. No one will want to look a fool in front of the others.’

He had wanted to bring his share of the profits, calculated cleanly, or, as Gubser put it, in a correct and Christian manner, to Janki today, and he was sorry, terribly sorry, that he had caused this stupid misunderstanding and startled Salomon like that. ‘You probably didn’t even come for dinner. Can’t I offer you something anyway? Really not?’

But perhaps, said Gubser, and looked for the next letter to relight his extinguished cigar, perhaps dear Herr Meijer would be kind enough to take the money to his nephew, or whatever the relationship between the two of them was, it was ready here in the office, and a decent businessman, strange as it might seem to Herr Meijer, didn’t sleep easily when they hadn’t paid their debts.

Gubser stood up and pushed his way past the edge of the table. He pulled open one drawer of the standing desk after the other while waving his other hand apologetically behind his back, which was probably supposed to mean: ‘You must forgive a person who is involved in as many business deals as I am, if he can’t remember every single insignificant detail all at once.’ Bending lower he stretched his bottom out towards Salomon. The beginning of a wide, red-and-white striped pair of braces peeped out from below his waistcoat.

‘Oh, that’s it!’ he said at last, in a voice that reinforced Salomon in his conviction that all this searching was a piece of theatre that he was staging for some unfathomable reason. Gubser straightened with a groan — he groan didn’t sound convincing either — and held out a packet wrapped in wax paper to Salomon, with both hands, as if it was too heavy to carry it otherwise. The packet was tied tightly and the knot reinforced with a lump of sealing wax, so thick that it would have been enough for ten letters.

‘Here!’ A good deal for your relative. We could have done the same thing, just you and me. We wouldn’t have needed him at all. I might even have given you forty per cent rather than only thirty. But you wouldn’t have had sufficient trust in me. A poor knowledge of human nature, Herr Meijer. A very poor knowledge of human nature.’

When Salomon handed the packet to Janki, he didn’t react. He went up to his attic room to check the contents, came back down as if nothing particular had happened, and didn’t even want to notice the curious faces of the others. He sat down with them at the table, ate herring and potatoes, drank tea, passed the bread when asked to do so, and it was only sometimes — although perhaps Mimi was imagining it — that he didn’t immediately notice when someone had asked him a question, and in order to reply he had to bring himself back from somewhere. ‘It must have something to do with the book he was reading to me from,’ she thought.

Golde held her knife and fork in her hands, two strange pieces of equipment whose purpose she couldn’t quite explain to herself, sucked her lower lip deep into her mouth and was chewing around on it. ‘There’s something different about him,’ she thought. ‘If he was my own son, would I know what it was?’

‘He’s a man and not a boy,’ Chanele thought and remembered the smell of the uniform.

‘I shouldn’t have taken him in,’ thought Salomon.

Janki pushed his plate away from him and suddenly smiled. ‘Is our neighbour Oggenfuss actually a good tailor?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ll have a new pair of trousers made for Pesach.’

Three months later Janki had a shop.

He didn’t set it up in peasant Endingen, where the Jews lived, as they did in Lengnau, not because the air was so healthy there, but because they hadn’t been granted permission to live anywhere else in the Confederation, no, Janki set up his shop in Baden, which wasn’t exactly Paris either, it wasn’t even Colmar, but it wasn’t a village, it was a small town whose inhabitants were interested in things other than the milk yields of their cows and the harvest from their fields.

The cellar, which in everyone’s opinion he had rented at too high a price — ‘I could get five byres for the same money!’ said Salomon — wasn’t very spacious. What Janki called ‘just right for an exclusive clientele’ was in Salomon’s words as cramped as shul on Yom Kippur, when everyone forces their way in to clear their debts with God. You might serve perhaps two or three customers in there in elegant intimacy, but it was already getting too cramped for a fourth, and a fifth, if there ever was one, would have to wait pressed against the wall until room came free at the counter. Of course, Janki would have had more surface area for his money in a less prominent situation, but the Vordere Metzggasse, situated between the Weite and the Mittlere Gasse, was the precise spot that he wanted. ‘If you want to impress people,’ he said, ‘you have to be on the Rue de Rivoli and not in some faubourg or other,’ an opinion with which Mimi keenly concurred, even though she knew neither where the Rue de Rivoli was, nor what a faubourg might be. Salomon refused to be convinced, and insisted that where he was concerned, he wouldn’t pay a higher price for a cow ‘just because it shits on gilded straw’. Nonetheless, even if he would never have admitted it, he was starting to like Janki. There weren’t many people who knew what they wanted.