Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Rather than playing with Chanele, Mimi had chosen to befriend Anne-Kathrin, with whom she could gather pearls and diamonds on the banks of the Surb, while Chanele insisted, with precocious maturity, that they were all only pebbles. When Mimi and Anne-Kathrin rescued the kitten that time, Chanele had only looked at the soaking creature, unmoved, her eyes small with concentration, and then said, ‘You know it’s a tom? We’ll have to have it castrated.’ But it then turned out, very much to Golde’s relief, that she had just picked the expression up somewhere, and had no concrete idea of what it meant.

Over the years a tradition of mutual disregard had grown up between the two young women, a ceasefire marked on both sides by unspoken contempt. Only sometimes, mostly begun by Mimi, were there violent arguments, although they didn’t clear the air like summer storms, but just went on rumbling and stopped at the horizon with thunder and lightning.

‘What do you want from Janki?’

‘What am I supposed to want from him?’

‘You’re giving him presents.’

‘Where does it say in the Shulchan Orech that I’m not allowed to?’

‘You knew I was sewing a money bag for him! What have you given him?’

‘Does that concern anyone but him?’

‘I want to say something to you.’ Mimi became so friendly that Chanele involuntarily lifted the pottery plate that she was holding in her hand like a shield in front of her chest. ‘A man like Janki isn’t interested in girls whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’

Chanele put the plate down on the table more violently than she needed to. And the cutlery that she took from the drawer clattered down more loudly than usual.

‘What do I care what he’s interested in?’

‘You gave him something!’

‘Don’t worry! It isn’t a red velvet money bag.’

‘Morocco leather! It’s Morocco leather!’

‘Make Shabbos with it!’ For the Sabbath you need very practical things: bread, wine, a piece of meat in your soup. Anything one might ironically compare with those is without reasonable value.

‘What have you given him?’ In her impatience Mimi held on tightly to Chanele’s hand. Chanele pulled away and went on laying the breakfast table.

‘A brush.’

‘A brush?’

‘And a rag.’

‘What sort of present is that? A rag?’

So that he can clean his boots. By the time he gets to Baden he’ll look as if he’s just emerged from a pigsty. Is he supposed to greet his customers with mucky shoes?’

Whether Mimi started laughing out of relief or because she found Chanele’s present so pitifully unromantic she couldn’t have said in retrospect. Any more than Chanele had an illuminating explanation for why she threw the damp cloth with which she had just wiped out the pan for the breakfast eggs into Mimi’s face. Mimi grabbed Chanele by the throat. Chanele clawed her fingers into Mimi’s unkempt curls.

When he heard the cries, Salomon Meijer, with his phylacteries still on his forehead and arm, came running from the sitting room, stood helplessly in the doorway and said, because one may not, when one has put on the tefillin, engage in conversation with anyone but God, only: ‘Now! Now! Now!’ Golde had just been combing her hair, before hiding it once more under the sheitel for the day, and with the thin grey strands over her white nightshirt she looked, like a girl grown old, even smaller than usual. She pushed the two young women apart, a dog separating two cattle much larger than itself, slapped them both roundly and demanded to know — ‘right now this minute!’ — what evil spirit had possessed them and made them so meshuga in broad daylight.

In their embarrassment, and because they didn’t really understand their own behaviour, Mimi and Chanele dismissed it as a harmless squabble between friends, which Golde didn’t believe, but accepted for the sake of a bit of peace. Over breakfast the two of them even chatted together, but with empty courtesy, as the Prussian and French negotiators chatted when they interrupted the capitulation negotiations for a bite to eat. As is customary among diplomats, the actual subject was not once mentioned in the Meijer household.

Today the subject did not take the direct path via Ehrendingen, but instead came up through the forest, took a wide detour via the Nussbaumener Hörnli. The route was longer, but on the narrow path at least one did not risk becoming embroiled in a tiresome conversation by a bored market traveller. Today Janki wanted to be all alone, he wanted to savour the anticipation of his first day as a businessman, he just wanted to dream, as he seldom allowed himself to do. In his head he ran through all the polite and yet not submissive phrases with which he would welcome his customers from the very beginning. A first one, equipped with a great deal of taste and even more money, was stepping into the shop in his imagination and was greeted, as Monsieur Delormes had greeted all ladies who didn’t look too matronly, with ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle’, when a loud voice dragged him from his daydreams. ‘The early bird catches the worm!’ the voice blared.

It was the schoolmaster, Anne-Kathrin’s father, a well-fed, pot-bellied man with a bushy beard, the only one in the village to practise movement for movement’s sake, and who had set off at this early hour for a refreshing stroll through the forest. With his checked trousers and his jacket dangling over his shoulder — the walking stick hung in its arm-hole served as a counterweight — he might have been mistaken for an English summer visitor, had his unmistakeable Swiss not immediately destroyed that illusion.

‘Ah, mon cher Monsieur!’ said the schoolmaster. ‘You are the Frenchman who has moved in with the cattle-trader Meijer, are you not? Exactly. Seek and ye shall find! I had no idea that you Frenchies’ — he actually said ‘Frenchies’, a word that Janki had never heard before — ‘have learned a lot from Jahn, our father of gymnastics. Amidst the mountain dew! I take this path every day, only in fine weather, of course. If it rains, I stand at the open window with my Indian clubs. Every day! I wanted to found a gymnastics club in the village, but the people here are not very open to new ideas. So be it! The strong man is most powerful on his own.’

‘Don’t let me hold you up,’ said Janki, and pressed himself against a tree to let the other man pass.

‘Not at all, not at all! Let’s walk together! Anyone who loves walking in the open air is a good friend of mine!’

‘Unlike you, I am not on the road for pleasure…’ Janki began, but his objection was immediately washed away by the schoolmaster’s next torrent of words.

‘Pleasure? Well, perhaps it is that too. But above all it is a duty. To nurture your body like a sacred temple. That you may thrive here on earth. Fresh, pious, happy, free! You Frenchies haven’t been nearly fresh enough, and far from pious, or else at Sedan the Prussians wouldn’t just have… You were there, they tell me.’

‘No, I…’

‘You will have to tell is all about it! No buts! I’m thinking of setting up a local education association, for all social classes. It isn’t just the lungs that need fresh air, the mind does too. Mens sana in corpore sano! I will invite you and you will tell us all about the great day. A massacre it was and not a battle. But you will have to excuse me. Words were exchanged enough, now is the time for deeds!’ Elbows bent, the schoolmaster set off again and marched puffing up the mountain.

However hard Janki tried, his lovely dream of hordes of contented lady customers refused to come back to life, so he nodded quite crossly to the schoolmaster when, even before Janki had reached the summit, he came down towards him again in the winding gait recommended by Jahn, the father of gymnastics. ‘As soon as the association has been founded.’