Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘Wouldn’t it be better if we waited until…?’ asked Pinchas.

But Mimi felt that she had a mission, and a mission can’t wait. Not even if there’s a sickly, rotten stench in the air and you’ve just stepped in some yellowish-green sludge. ‘First of all,’ she said, just as she had planned to on the journey, ‘first of all’ — she had at last found a relatively clean spot where one could stand without touching anything — ‘first of all one thing must be clear: nothing can come of us. Ever.’

‘But…’ said Pinchas.’

‘Never.’ Mimi felt like a character in a novel.

‘What if my father lends me the money for the pivot tooth?’

‘It has nothing to do with that.’

‘I fell because I was reading as I walked, and tripped. That’s how I knocked my tooth out. But with a pivot tooth…’

‘Enough about your wretched pivot tooth!’ The conversation wasn’t going as Mimi had planned.

‘I know it looks ugly.’

‘You’re not ugly.’

‘Do you really think so, Miriam?’

It wasn’t easy to tell through the clouds of steam, but Mimi actually had a sense that Pinchas was blushing.

‘I mean…’ she said.

‘You’ve just made me very happy.’

He just didn’t seem to understand what she was trying to say to him. Luckily a sentence occurred to her, one that she had liked a great deal in a book and which suited the situation perfectly. ‘Our hearts don’t sing the same tune,’ she said.

‘What sort of tune?’ asked Pinchas.

‘No tune. Forget the tune!’

‘You said…’

‘I was going to say: you and I are just too different.’

‘Of course we’re different,’ said Pinchas and bent low over his pot. ‘I’m a man and you’re a woman. So—’

‘Are you even listening to me?’ asked Mimi.

But Pinchas had stopped listening. He had spotted from some change in the stock pot that the right moment had come, so he hauled the paddle out, the pale white intestines snaking from it, laid it over the edges of the pot and then — Mimi felt a bitter taste rising in her throat and couldn’t look away — then he grabbed the revolting, wobbly stuff with his bare hands, pulled it hand over fist out of the brew and hung it in dripping garlands on a stand.

‘So,’ Pinchas said at last and walked over to her, ‘now we can talk.’

Mimi started retching.

In Baden, Chanele was being shown around the shop that she’d already heard so much about, and saying, because Janki seemed to expect as much, a few words of praise about the establishment. She felt as if she was being challenged to say something about the carpentry of the coffin-maker at a funeral. All the time when she was in the shop not a single customer appeared, and when she left to go shopping, Janki was standing forlornly behind his new counter, a little boy with a birthday present that the other children don’t want to play with.

Red Moische, and also the pedlars by whom Endingen was sometimes overrun as if by ants in the spring, feared Chanele as an expert customer. She knew how to test the firmness of a hem with her teeth, and which colour the gills of a carp should have if it was really fresh. Golde even let her go shopping for the chicken on Shabbos, and Chanele only had to look at a bird to predict to within half a cup how much fat it would produce. Here in the town everything was different. The shops were strange, the traders unfamiliar, and Chanele didn’t even know exactly what kind of shop she should do her shopping in. She stood for a long while in front of a shop window full of all kinds of tools, before walking on. She was already holding the handle to the door of the hardware shop, but she didn’t like the look of the owner, who was smiling at her so expectantly through the glass. In the end she decided for a barber.

When the shop doorbell rang, three men turned their heads to her at once: the barber, his customer and a man dressed in grey who, Tagblatt in hand, was waiting to be served. Only the hairdresser’s wife, ensconced on a high chair behind the till, didn’t seem to notice her. The three of them studied Chanele for a moment, saw nothing worth looking at, and resumed the conversation they had been having when she came in.

‘Now finish your story, Bruppbacher,’ said the customer. When he talked, only the freshly shaven half of his face seemed to move, while the other, behind a thick application of soapy foam, lay dead next to it.

The barber was dressed like an artist, with a narrow neckerchief tied into a bow. On his upper lip there sat a waxed moustache that ended in a point, the masterpiece that a craftsman proudly puts on display in his window. ‘Certainly, Doctor,’ he said. ‘So the man waits and waits. Eventually the landlord closes the book and says, “Sorry, we have only one very small room free. And I’m sorry to say that your nose wouldn’t fit in it.”’

The man with the foam on his face laughed.

The waiting man lowered his paper. ‘Vulgar,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Jokes don’t solve problems.’

‘Excuse me.’ Chanele took a step into the barber’s shop. ‘Do you have razors?’

‘No,’ the barber replied, ‘I shave my customers with a spoon.’

The man in the chair laughed so violently that he blew scraps of foam into the air.

‘I mean,’ said Chanele, ‘what I meant was: do you have razors for sale?’

‘Of course,’ said the barber. ‘I sell razors and tobacco and silk stockings. Welcome to the Baden emporium!’

The visible half of his customer’s face turned crimson. He had choked on the shaving foam out of sheer delight.

‘Have some manners,’ the man in the grey suit said reproachfully and turned to Chanele. ‘What kind of razor were you after?’

‘I think I’ve come to the wrong place.’ Chanele was about to turn to leave, but the man grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go.

‘No, no, tell us! What kind of razor do you need?’

Chanele looked at the floor in embarrassment. She tried to free herself, but the man’s hand was as firm as iron. Then she whispered almost silently: ‘I thought a barber… If you want to remove facial hair…’

‘Facial hair?’ The man’s fingers ran almost tenderly over the flower in his lapel. ‘We can’t help you there, I’m afraid. If you’d needed one to slit your throat, we’d have been happy to help you.’ He said it so politely, without raising his voice, that it took Chanele a few seconds to understand his meaning.

The man in the shaving chair only started laughing then as well.

The barber’s wife, who had followed the whole conversation with an expressionless face climbed down from her high chair and pushed Chanele towards the door. ‘It’s better if you go now. Can’t you tell that you’re not wanted here?’ she said.

Mimi would never have thought that she would one day be sitting with Pinchas in Anne-Kathrin’s gazebo. But she had to talk to him, she needed fresh air, and there aren’t many places in a village where you can go unobserved. They sat as far away from one another as the hexagon of the bench allowed. Pinchas stared out into the garden as if he was interested only in rosebushes and bunches of elderflower. Without noticing, he kept sticking the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth; it looked as if there was something alive in his mouth.

‘Yesterday you said you’d try to help him. Help us. Help me.’

‘I’d do anything for you.’ The sentence had been waiting a whole night to at last be uttered, and it forced its way out of Pinchas like a prisoner from his dark cell.

‘Even though you know…?’

‘Not the same tune. I’ve understood.’ Pinchas lowered his head. He would have had quite an attractive profile if it hadn’t been for that sparse beard. And the gap in his teeth, of course.