Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘Forget? They forget nothing. The truths, perhaps, but not the lies. They still know the stories that the Babylonians and the Romans came up with against us, and they tell those stories and they believe them. Sometimes they say, “We are modern people so we know that none of that is true,” but they still don’t stop believing in it. It’s stuck firmly in their heads. Lies have a lot of barbs, they surely do.

‘Sometimes you won’t hear the lie for a few years, but it’s just sleeping then and collecting its strength. Until somewhere a child disappears, or someone remembers a child that did. Then it’s wide awake again. Then we’re holding the knife in our hands again, the long, sharp knife, then we gather in a circle again with our beards and our crooked noses, then we stab away again, and the child goes on screaming, the poor, innocent, fair-haired child, and we go on laughing as we always laugh, and the blood flows into the bowl again, and again we bake it into our matzohs, and everything is as it was. They don’t forget.

‘They can name the passages in the Talmud that aren’t in it, and which they’ve all read anyway. They know our commandments, which don’t exist, very precisely, they know them better than their own. Forget? Do you really think they forget anything?’

Janki’s soup had gone cold long ago, but they were all still sitting around the table, sitting straight on their chairs and not looking at each other. Only Uncle Melnitz had made himself comfortable, had spread himself out and leaned back like someone who has decided to stay for a long time. He talked and talked.

No one listened to him.

Everyone tried not to listen to him.

Then Janki did go back to Baden, hopelessly, as one plays to the end a game one has lost, just to count up the points that one will have to pay. To general surprise Chanele went with him. She needed to buy something, she explained, and besides, she hadn’t been in Baden for ages, and had an unclaimed day off. Salomon couldn’t contradict her on this one, because if one wanted to look at it in those terms, Chanele had never had a day off; she was seen as a member of the family, and for that reason she wasn’t paid a wage.

The two walked side by side in silence, so quickly that they repeatedly passed other, slower walkers, a peasant woman with a basket full of chickens, or a basket-maker balancing all his goods piled high on his back. As he marched, Janki kept his eyes fixed firmly forward, and yet he could have described quite precisely what Chanele was wearing: a brown dress of a fabric which was known in Paris as ‘paysanne’, and which Monsieur Delormes only bought so that he could give a few metres of it to a washer-woman or a seamstress. The fabric was too heavy to fall really loosely, but the tailor — if it had not been Chanele herself — had brought out the waist so skilfully that the skirt puffed out in a bell-like shape at the hips, and swung with every step she took. The round neckline and the sleeves were trimmed with something that looked at first sight like lace, but which was only folded white batist, a material that was normally used for petticoats and night-shirts, for everything, Janki had learned that touches the skin directly.

Chanele’s petticoat, he was sure, was bound to be of less fine a material, and her blouse…

‘You shouldn’t have taken the trouble,’ he said. ‘I would have been happy to bring you whatever it is that you need.’

‘Thank you,’ Chanele replied. And then, ten or twenty paces later, ‘It’s something that men know nothing about.’

Her hair was, as always, rolled up in a bun and pushed into a net. For the journey she had put on a headscarf and sometimes, because she needed to cool down or was lost in thoughts, she put her hand to the back of her neck and lifted the bundle of hair a little as if to test its weight. Janki’s father had always done that with his money bag when the last farmer had gone and he wanted to assess his takings.

Janki tried to imagine how long Chanele’s hair might be, whether when she combed it it reached to her belt or even further, and whether in bed at night…

‘It could be a hot day,’ he said.

‘Even hotter if you have to iron the laundry,’ she said.

Chanele walked at the same pace as he did, left, right, left, right, without, as most women would have done, tripping along after his long soldier’s stride. She must have had powerful legs, and yet, to judge by the slenderness of her arms, they were certainly not thick. You could imagine that Chanele…

‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.

Janki had to reflect for a moment before he remembered why he was travelling to Baden.

‘He could just as easily have stayed here and learned something from me,’ said Salomon Meijer. He was sitting at the table in the sitting room and had set out a fat book and a stack of papers and notes. ‘This business about blood lines is an extremely interesting matter.’

Golde, the hard working woman, considered Salomon’s big project of drawing up the definitive family tree of all the Simmental cows kept in the district to be impractical nonsense, but she didn’t contradict her husband. But as they had been married for a long time, Salomon still responded to her reservations.

‘If I ever finish it…’

‘If,’ thought Golde.

‘… one will be able to predict whether a cow is worth something even before it is born. And not only me, but someone who hasn’t the first notion about beheimes. Like Janki, for example.’

‘He isn’t even interested in it.’

‘He will be. He can forget all about his drapery store, that meshugas. But he has a head on his shoulders, and if he involved himself in the cattle trade…’

‘Do you think he really likes Mimi?’ Golde had skipped over a whole chain of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’, but she had only arrived at the spot where Salomon was already.

‘If he isn’t an idiot…’ said Salomon Meijer.

‘No,’ said Golde, ‘an idiot he isn’t.’

They could talk as openly as this because Mimi had gone for a walk again. ‘You’ve been going for lots of walks lately,’ Salomon had grumbled, but then he had decided not to enquire into the matter any further. He wouldn’t have received an answer, or at least not an honest one. Because Mimi’s path took her not into the countryside but into the middle of the village, to a door that she normally avoided if possible, to a very surprised Sarah Pomeranz.

Mimi had set out very precisely the story she wanted to tell: how her father had claimed she couldn’t even make an omelette without burning it — he had actually once said something similar — and how she had then planned to surprise him, to prove her culinary arts, with a home-made cake. ‘It will have to be a very special cake,’ she was going to say, ‘a cake for King Solomon in person. I only know one person in Endingen who can give me the recipe for such a cake, so…’ But when Sarah opened the door, swathed in an aura of rosewater and bubbling oil, her concerns about Janki were greater than all her plans, and Mimi only said impatiently, ‘Where is Pinchas?’

‘Where do you think? In the shop.’

There can hardly be a less favourable moment to meet the woman you dream about every night than when you are precooking cow’s intestines. Your hands aren’t just dirty, they’re repellently slippery, you look like an old maid because you’ve tied a cloth around your hair so that the smell doesn’t linger in it, and worst of all you can’t interrupt your work. Intestines precooked for too long fall apart and can’t be used for sausages.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ said Pinchas, ‘but…’

‘Don’t stop!’ He bent obediently over the steaming pot and stirred around with a big paddle with holes in it, the kind also used in laundries. The steam had covered all the surfaces with a pattern of tiny drops.