Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘Why?’ There was something pleading in Mimi’s voice that touched Pinchas as if she had taken his hand.

‘They believe bad things about us. And: it’s a good story.’

‘You think that’s good?’

‘I’m sorry. I mean: a good invention. Do you love him?’ He hadn’t wanted to say that. It had escaped him like a bird, which one has thought long tamed, escaping from a cage.

‘Who?’

‘Janki.’

‘ Certainement pas! ’ said Mimi and made her sharp face. ‘He really is meshuga,’ she thought.

‘Because: if that’s the case, I would try to help him.’

‘You?’

‘Yes,’ said Pinchas and had to bend very low to examine his socks for holes. ‘Because I would also be helping you. And for you…’

‘Nu?’

Pinchas knew exactly how the sentence would have continued. But the last remains of his small courage were used up, and all that he could utter was: ‘My mother doesn’t like darning socks. She prefers baking cakes.’ Which, as he reproached himself again and again throughout a long, sleepless night, Solomon would doubtless have left out of his Song of Songs.

After such a sentence you can only get up, walk away and never come back. He left the newspaper on the ground and didn’t once look up when he, slouching along on a single slipper, set off on the endless journey home. Had his mother baked honey cakes? He would never be able to eat another honey cake as long as he lived.

When Janki came at last, it was almost dark. He moved as he had often done as a soldier, like an automaton, without a will of his own, impelled only by habit. His head was bowed and he walked straight ahead. Only sometimes, if a dandelion grew in the middle of the road, did he swerve to behead it with a kick. Mimi called him, and he stopped, as an exhausted army unit stops and waits for the next command: if it comes, you will carry it out, if not, you can stay like that until the end of time.

‘How was it?’ asked Mimi, although the back of his bent neck already told her the answer.

‘If no customers come tomorrow, that will be twice as much as today.’ He had thought of that sentence as a brave joke, but on the way from Baden to Endingen any humour had been stifled in the dust from the road.

‘That newspaper article…’

‘Yes,’ said Janki. ‘That newspaper article. I didn’t hear a single shot in the whole war, and now I’m being killed with newsprint.’

‘What will you do?’

Janki spread his arms, further and further, as if he wanted to take off and fly away. ‘There are enough stables in the world,’ he said at last. ‘There is always room for someone who can hold a pitchfork. Then, in response to a command that he alone had heard, he set off once more, left, right, left, right. When he passed Mimi, his shoulders were weighed down as if by a kitbag.

Mimi ran after him. ‘Here! A letter came for you. From Paris!’

Janki slit open the seal and unfolded the paper very slowly, a condemned man without hope that his request for pardon will be heard. He read the letter, nodded, nodded again, and on his face there appeared the same expression that the dead sometimes wore when their sinews contract and it looks as if they are laughing.

‘That fits,’ said Janki. ‘Monsieur Delormes is dead.’

During the siege of Paris, François Delormes had eaten his fill. He knew a lot of diplomats and officers, and a man has as few secrets from his tailor as he does from his valet. François Delormes had known more than many others what was about to happen in Paris, and he had prepared himself. In the private dressing room reserved for the best customers, he had installed a shelf and filled it over the weeks, with bottles of wine, of course, champagne that makes the heart beat faster, and Burgundy that warms it, but above all with the delicacies that would soon cease to exist, foie gras from the Périgord, in yellow tins that gleamed like the purest gold, oval terrines, in which pheasants and hares slumbered under layers of fat as they awaited their resurrection, baskets of oranges and lemons, sugarloafs lined up side by side, with blue ribbons around their bellies, court officials before a state banquet waiting for the guests to arrive. On the stands, where in times of peace the hangers with half-finished clothes had jostled, there now hung whole hams and sides of bacon, fat sausages from the Ardennes and thin ones from the Belgian border. When the besieging army encircled the city and the roar of the cannons became louder and louder, François Delormes dismissed all his employers, the cutters and the seamstresses, the old ironing ladies and the young girls with the slender fingers who had sewn on the sequins for the evening gowns. He shut himself away in his studio, and while Paris starved he sat alone in his town house on the Rue de Rivoli and ate. When he was found, the leg of a confit guinea fowl was still stuck in his throat; in his greed he had tried to swallow it, all at once.

There was nothing of any of this in the letter, only that the writers regretted to inform Monsieur Jean Meijer that Maître François Delormes had not survived the siege of his city, and that Monsieur Meijer would unfortunately have to start his new business, for which, incidentally, they wished him the very best of luck, without a letter of recommendation. The letter was signed by one Paul-Marc Lemercier, whom Janki remembered as a dry accountant, and to whom the firm now apparently belonged.

‘That fits,’ said Janki bitterly. ‘That fits precisely.’

Dinner time had passed long ago, but there was still a plate ready for Janki on the table. Chanele had kept some soup warm, which, if hours passed and the soup was to stay tasty, represented a lot of effort, but when Janki just sat there and didn’t even touch his spoon, she didn’t press him and asked no questions. It was Mimi who told her at last what had happened, not mentioning Pinchas once, and reacting furiously. Salomon wanted to know since when she read the papers.

‘I’m not a child any more!’ she said, thinking, ‘You have no idea how little of a child I am.’

‘People will forget,’ Golde said consolingly, and didn’t believe her fine words herself.

Salomon stroked his whiskers, shook his head and said thoughtfully, ‘If it is said that a famer has had the plague in his byre—’

‘This isn’t about farmers!’ Chanele cut in, Chanele who never normally involved herself in family discussions. ‘It’s about Janki.’

‘You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll make my own way. That is: I’ll make some sort of way. Somewhere.’ As he sat there so dejectedly, behind Janki’s narrow face one could sense the gaunt bird-like head that he would one day have as an old man.

‘They’ll forget,’ Golde repeated. ‘They’ll definitely forget.’

‘Why?’

Uncle Melnitz, whom no one had thought about while all the changes and plans of the past few weeks were going on, pushed his chair closer to the table. He was, as always, dressed all in black, and he enjoyed, as always, his own pessimism.

‘Why should they forget? They never forget anything. The more absurd it is, the more clearly they remember it. Just as they remember that we slaughter little children, always before Pesach, and bake their blood in matzohs. It’s never happened, but even five hundred years later they can tell you how we did it. How we enticed the little boy from his parents, how we promised him presents or chocolate, long before chocolate existed. They know every detail.

‘They can describe to you the knife we used, as precisely as if they’d held it in their own hands. They know where we made the cut, at the throat or above the heart, they know what the bowl looks like, the one we caught the blood in, every year, everywhere, because matzohs aren’t kosher without Christian blood. They know it all. They can tell you the name of the child, quite precisely. It says so on the saints’ calendar. It’s never happened, but they remember, they have a grave that they visit, an altar, and on feast days they stove in a few Jewish heads by way of commemoration.