Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

One further disadvantage of Janki’s new shop was the fact that both spaces had served as a grocer’s store-room, and more particularly for his spices. Janki did engage a painter, and even had him come for a second time for good money, but the heavy aroma of ginger, cardamom and nutmeg resisted all attempts to dispel it, dug its way into cracks and crannies from which, particularly on hot days, it crept unsuspected and settled especially in the doors that Jani had fitted over his fabric shelves, so that he could dramatically display his goods by parting the curtains. Even decades later the smell of gingerbread and ginger nuts still reminded many of the residents of Baden of being led by their mother’s hand to Frenchman Meijer’s shop.

Janki also, after a detailed consultation with Red Moische, had the same painter who had painted the walls make a store sign, French Drapery Jean Meijer . As he had little room at his disposal on his narrow part of the façade, the letters were not as big as Janki would have wished, and for the same reason he did not take Moische’s advice to leave a little space on the right so that he could later add the words and Sons . But there was one thing that Janki did not want on any account to do without: a coat of arms decorated with a little crown, like the ones that court suppliers had on their signs. As a sign for his coat of arms he ordered an orb, the result of which, dashed off unlovingly by the artist, looked more like an etrog, the citrus fruit needed for the rituals of the Feast of Tabernacles.

Even though the grocer would have let him have his own at a good price, Janki had a new counter made, wide enough for him to roll out a length of fabric on it. When the counter arrived, he locked himself in for a whole day and repeatedly practised a gesture that he had admired in Monsieur Delormes; he had had the knack of swirling the massive wooden pole the bale was rolled around through the air without any apparent effort, until the fabric assumed its own weightless life and floated towards the customer with metropolitan elegance. ‘You must feel the dress just by looking at the fabric,’ Monsieur Delormes had always said.

Janki had his first fabrics brought from Paris. As the cost of the shop’s conversion had exceeded his budget, and he had to request a loan as an unknown businessman, there was so little that the doors over the shelves served to hide the gaps rather than present the goods on offer. The selection could have been much bigger had Janki not insisted on having only the choicest materials on offer but, Mimi explained to her hopelessly old-fashioned father, ‘If you want to have the best customers, you must offer the best goods.’ Along with the order, Janki had sent a letter to be passed on to Monsieur Delormes, in the hope that the famous man might give him a letter of recommendation which, printed in the Badener Tagblatt , would certainly make a big impression on the public. So far no answer had arrived, so that Janki had to settle for advertisements and notices, which he signed, ‘Jean Meijer, formerly of the most important fashion houses in Paris’.

In spite of his new status as boss of his own company, Janki still lived in his attic room in Endingen. Golde wouldn’t have allowed anything else, and with all the expenditure required by the shop, a flat of his own would really have been a needless waste of money. Every morning before six o’clock, without breakfast and with only a piece of bread in his pocket, he walked the two-hour journey to Baden; he had learned how to march, after all, and it was also, he explained, much easier, ‘when you know that what awaits you at your destination is not a battle, but at worst a skirmish with a painter or a cabinet maker’.

On the long-awaited day of the opening he wanted to set off as early as possible, but he was held back by Mimi, who was normally extremely reluctant to leave her warm bed. She couldn’t have got up early today either, because her hair still fell unkempt over the shoulders of her dove-grey dressing gown. That disorderly frame gave her face a wild, gypsy quality, an expression that suited her very well, as she had established at the mirror. Not without a certain embarrassment she held a present out to Janki, a money bag of soft, red Morocco leather, which she herself had embroidered with the letters J M. A little crown, like the ones on the signs of the court suppliers, hovered over the monogram. As she handed it over, their hands touched, and inside the money bag — was Janki trembling, or was it Mimi? — a coin moved. ‘It’s only a lucky rappen,’ Mimi said quickly, ‘so that you do good business and it is never empty.’

‘Thank you. Merci. But now I should really…’ The sentence lay there, a clock that nobody had remembered to wind.

‘Yes,’ said Mimi. ‘You should.’ Her lips were suddenly dry, and she had to run her tongue over them.

‘I should be on time today of all days,’ said Janki, and still didn’t move.

‘Today of all days,’ said Mimi.

‘The money bag is beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ said Mimi, ‘it certainly is.’

‘What does JM stand for?’

Mimi didn’t understand him. ‘Janki Meijer, of course.’

‘Shame,’ said Janki.

Only Anne-Kathrin, to whom Mimi reported the conversation word-for-word that same morning, could find an explanation for that strange reaction, an explanation so illuminating that Mimi burst into tears and repeated several times in a tone of self-reproach that she was a cow, a silly cow, and if Janki now thought she was a beef cow that you had to lead by a ring through its nose before it noticed where it was going, if he despised her now as a village clod, then she had only herself to blame. Not that she wanted anything from Janki, certainement pas , she wouldn’t even think of it, but that she had not previously thought about the many ways in which such a monogram could be read, that she could not forgive herself, not if she lived to a hundred and twenty.

J M: Janki and Mimi.

So Janki said ‘Shame’, without guessing at the whirlwind of truly Talmudic interpretations those two syllables could produce. That Mimi did not immediately understand him certainly had something to do with the fact that at that precise moment Chanele arrived, she too bringing a present to celebrate the opening of Janki’s business: a little bundle wrapped shapelessly in a cloth, which she pressed into his hand with an almost reproachful ‘There, for you!’ as one eventually, and reluctantly, yields to a child’s endless pleading. Neither did she wait to see if he would unwrap it on the spot, but disappeared into the kitchen, where she was heard clattering pots and pans around as if they’d done something to her.

Janki shrugged, put the little bundle in the pocket of his coat and set off. Although Mimi stood behind the door for a long time, apparently completely fascinated by a sparrow taking its morning bath in the dust of the street, he didn’t turn round.

‘Why did you have to get involved?’

‘Involved in what?’

‘You know exactly what I mean.’

No proper friendship, or even a sisterly feeling, had ever arisen between Mimi and Chanele, contrary to what Salomon had hoped, when he had so unexpectedly brought home a second baby. If Chanele was to replace Mimi’s stillborn brother, the plan was a failure; Mimi had, from the very start, resisted her rival, yelling herself sick and hoarse, had tried to peck her away as an old rooster would peck away a young one, had clung weeping to Golde for hours, and later, when she grew older, probably rubbed onions in her eyes to make the tears to which she seemed to lay claim visible for all the world. As Chanele — by her nature, or because no other possible role was open to her — proved to be a quiet, undemanding child, who allowed herself to be ordered about rather than issuing the orders — it soon became quite obvious which, in the old proverb, was the dog and which the flea.