Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘You’re meshuga!’ said Janki. ‘What will I do if anyone asks me whether it’s all true?’

Mimi smiled a conspiratorial smile. ‘You deny it all, of course. Not a word is true, you say. Or it’s about a completely different Jean M. Pinchas says if you say it’s a lie everybody will believe it.’

It hadn’t even been difficult to place the story in the paper. Anne-Kathrin, who as the daughter of a schoolmaster had the loveliest handwriting, copied the text out neatly, and a market driver who was going to Baden anyway dropped it off at the editorial office. The editor was a queer customer who saw himself as a bit of a scholar, and who devoted more attention to the four-volume History of the County of Baden , upon which he had been working for years, than he did to the contents of his newspaper. He scanned the article briefly and then sent the office boy to take it to the setter.

‘“Master pupil!”’ said Janki furiously. ‘I was a shlattenschammes! I worked in the textile warehouse!’

‘You want to sell textiles too,’ Mimi replied, thinking, ‘He should be grateful to me. Why’s he getting so worked up?’

On the stroke of nine the first customer was waiting outside the shop door on the Vordere Metzggasse. When it remained shut in spite of her knocking, she went home again and said to her cook, ‘He hasn’t come today. His injury is probably causing him too much pain.’

‘Sedan!’ said Janki. ‘I don’t know anything more about the battle than the things people say about it!’

‘Neither does anyone else,’ said Mimi.

In a barber’s shop in Baden a customer reading a newspaper was so startled by something he had just read that he jumped, jerking his head so violently that the razor cut deep into his cheek. ‘Be careful, Bruppbacher!’ he cried furiously. The barber’s wife slipped from her high chair and brought alum and a cloth to dab the blood from his grey suit.

‘And I’m not going to Baden!’ Janki said for the third time. ‘Never again.’ He hooked his fingers together behind the back of the chair as if someone were trying to pull him away.

‘So that man was right? Selling out because of the abandonment of the business?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Janki. ‘But…’

‘You have a visitor.’

Even before Chanele could ask him in, the schoolmaster had pushed his way into the room, flying out of the corridor like a cork out of a bottle, talking already. ‘Mon cher Monsieur! And, oh yes, Fräulein Meijer. My compliments. I guessed as much! Is that not so? I felt it. Unless you feel, naught will you ever gain. If everyone is after you now, don’t forget that I was the one who invited you first. My popular education association! You must be our first guest. You must. As soon as it has been founded. Oh, such furore there will be! Furore, I tell you. No smoke, no mirrors.’ He waved a walking stick with a carved handle as if conducting an orchestra.

‘I don’t quite understand what you…’

The schoolmaster nodded, as if he had no intention of stopping. ‘Discretion, I understand. “Jean M.” and not a letter more. My lips are sealed. Whether it’s Meili or Müller or — I only suggest this as an example, purely theoretical — or Meijer, it matters not in the slightest. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But when I opened the Tagblatt today, it was clear to me straight away… Oh my apprehensive soul!’

‘The article to which you are probably referring has nothing to do with me!’

Pinchas had not been mistaken: only now did the schoolmaster fully believe the story.

‘Such exemplary modesty!’ he crowed. ‘I knew at once. But I should still like to make one request. If you happened to have a fabric in your storeroom that would suit a young girl… Do you know my daughter? Of course you don’t. Why should you? She hardly ever sets foot outside the door. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen. A piece of fabric, as I say, for a dress. Not too dear, obviously. As a schoolmaster one doesn’t have two pennies to rub together. Although: Non scholae sed vitae … But I don’t want to hold you up. Please forgive the intrusion, Fräulein Meijer.’

He stopped in the doorway, came back and laid his walking stick on the table. ‘Here. I nearly forgot this. For you. After such an injury you will certainly find walking far less strenuous with something to lean on. The handle is a lion. The most heroic of beasts for the most heroic of men. But never forget, my young friend: brave can be the merest slave. Discretion is the better part of valour. It has been a pleasure, Herr Meijer. A real pleasure.’

Janki’s shop was not exactly overrun, but neither did he have to wait so much as half a day or even half an hour for custom. It was the old women and the very young women who discovered the French Drapery before everyone else. At first they visited the vault out of curiosity, and probably whispered when the elegant young Frenchman brought a heavy bale of fabric from a shelf — with one hand! — and hid his limp so bravely. At first Janki took his stick reluctantly to the shop, but soon he found himself reaching for it without even thinking, indeed, that he felt something was missing if he wasn’t holding it in his hand. And what was wrong with that? If Salomon had an umbrella, why should Janki not have a stick?

Very gradually he became used, when walking, to letting one leg — not always the same one, until in the end he settled on the right one — drag very slightly behind the other and sometimes, particularly when he had been standing behind his counter for a while, it seemed to him that he could actually feel a dull ache in it. When his customers asked him questions, which — and this was a pleasant side effect as far as his revenue was concerned — they thought appropriate only after the third or fourth visit, he only shook his head and smiled wistfully, which could be interpreted either as regret over the persistence of a ridiculous story, or as a painful memory. It became customary among the better ladies of the town to try out on him the French that they had picked up in their afternoon conversation circles, and Jean Meijer not only understood them, but praised their pronunciation.

The cramped space of the cellar proved to be more and more of an advantage. In the French Drapery one felt as if one were not in a shop but in a salon, as if one were not a customer, but a guest, and if Janki, as sometimes happened, had to send a customer away because at that moment sadly, sadly, there was simply no more room for her, he filled all the others with pride.

There was also the fact that Janki really did know something about fabrics, and his goods, whether one really believed in their mythological origins or not, were of good quality. It was not long before he was able to order new fabric from Paris for the first time, and soon the doors over the shelves were to close only at the end of the day; there were no more gaps to hide, and as the press of customers grew there was no more time to be wasted on superficial fripperies.

The man in the grey suit was never seen again, but Janki sensed his undiminished interest behind the intensified attention that the market police paid him and his shop on an almost daily basis. Once when he offered the inspectors a special discount on purchases made by their wives, something that would have been par for the course in Paris, they even threatened him to report him to the governor for attempted bribery.

‘I will have to engage a clerk,’ he said in the kitchen one evening.

Very much to Salomon’s annoyance the orderly rhythm of life in the Meijer household had been thrown increasingly out of kilter. At dinner they all waited until Janki was back from Baden, and he was often late, although lately he had been recognised more and more often, and was therefore given lifts by carts and even carriages. Salomon could drum reproachfully on the table top as much as he wanted, his impatient ‘Nu?’ was simply ignored. Once Golde even asked him, ‘Is it too much to ask for you to wait a few minutes for the boy?’ ‘For the boy,’ she said, as if this Janki weren’t just a shnorrer who’d wandered in from somewhere, a shnorrer who happened to be a relative, fair enough, but a shnorrer none the less.