Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

And when he did finally deign to arrive, in boots that Salomon had given him, and carrying that ridiculous walking stick, he didn’t even apologise for keeping the head of the household waiting with his stomach rumbling, but let the three women of the house go clucking around him, dancing around him as if he were the Golden Calf, did all the talking at the table, talked about his constantly rising profits and the new, even bigger order that he planned to make over the next few days, and if he did once in a while ask about Salomon’s business deals, the question had, in Salomon’s ears, a certain condescending quality, like someone with twenty cows in the byre kindly inquiring about his neighbour’s rabbits. No, in those first few weeks Salomon was not happy about Janki’s success. He saw himself being displaced from the centre of the family, he sensed a hidden irony behind every politesse, an ageing territorial prince spotting conspiracies everywhere, unable to show his annoyance because it would have been interpreted as envy. But what Janki had said a moment before, That was going too far. Engaging a clerk! And perhaps a liveried coachman and a valet while he was about it?

‘I have run my business on my own for a lifetime and it has done me no harm whatsoever,’ said Salomon. He reached his hand out towards the bowl of coleslaw and noted with satisfaction that Golde, Mimi and Chanele all leapt up at once to pass it to him. ‘Employees cost more than they’re worth.’

‘A textile shop and a cattle-trading business aren’t the same thing,’ Janki objected.

‘Quite right,’ said Salomon. ‘Cows need to be fed and watered and milked. Even on Shabbos. Even at Yontev. Do you have to do that to your bales of fabric, too? Exactly! But does that mean I take on a stable boy? No. You pay a peasant a few francs. You organise yourself. You find a way. And you want a clerk for your little shop?’

‘I could take better care of my customers if I had someone to do the little things. The till, for example…’

‘The till?’ Salomon was so worked up that he almost choked on his herb salad. ‘Just put a sign on the door: “Ganev wanted!” Or put it in the paper. Maybe Pinchas Pomeranz will write you a nice article. “Since the battlefield of Sedan, where a bullet struck his red Morocco money bag” — Salomon had always known more about things than Mimi was entirely happy with — “since that time Jean M. has been uncomfortable in the presence of money, so he is looking for someone to take it from him.” If I have learned something in my life, it is this: you do not let anyone, whether Jew or Goy, anywhere near your till!’ God’s voice from the burning bush could not have sounded more threatening.

‘And what if he employed a relative?’ asked Golde.

‘What sort of relative? Uncle Eisik from Lengnau, who people only give work to because they have rachmones on him? Or do you want to go and work in Janki’s shop, perhaps? Or Mimi?’

Chanele cleared her throat. She looked different lately, and no one could really explain why.

‘I’d like to try something else,’ said Chanele.

She plucked a few hairs every day, only a very few. She pinched each one individually with the tweezers, gripped it tightly as one grips the throat of an enemy that one has finally, finally managed to get hold of, pressed the ends of the tiny pliers together as firmly as she could, did it so violently that her whole arm quivered, and then pulled the hair out with a jerk. She enjoyed the short, stinging pain associated with it every time, couldn’t wait for it and yet dragged it out just as Salomon like to draw out the redeeming sneeze after a pinch of snuff. Sometimes she let go of a hair she had gripped, granted it a reprieve without, however, lifting the death sentence, looked for another and a third, let the tweezers gently and with cold delicacy stroke the spot where the nose passes into the brow. On other days she was so filled with impatience, furious, painful impatience, that instead of a hair she gripped the skin and tore out whole chunks of herself and then had to cover the bleeding wound with a piece of gauze and tell Golde she had been sweeping crumbs and had bumped into the edge of the table when she stood up.

She did it all without light, just with the feeling in her fingers, just as a blind man, they say, if he is hungry enough, will find a handful of scattered grains on a gravel path. She bolted the door to her room, shut the shades in the middle of the day and, if too much light pierced the cracks, hung a bed-sheet over it and then sat down before the shell-framed mirror that Salomon had brought her from the market in Zurzach for her twelfth birthday. At twelve you were a woman, and women, he had said with a laugh at the time, like to make themselves beautiful. How little he knew her! She sat at the mirror, in which nothing was reflected, felt for the tweezers which — as long as you’re hungry enough! — she always found as soon as she reached her hand out, and clicked the ends together a few times, making them sound like those insects that you hear on the leaves on quiet summer nights. Then, always slightly breathless, she began her ritual.

Afterwards she didn’t look at herself in a mirror, on principle, she sought the change in her image only in the gaze of others, she was glad when their eyes rested on her for longer than usual and sought an answer without noticing the question. She didn’t become vain, that would have been too out of keeping with her character, but in the morning she hesitated longer than usual when she had to choose between her few dresses. Once, only once, she had gone almost all the way downstairs with her hair down, her freshly combed hair that fell far below her shoulders, before hurrying back to her room and wrapping it again in her net.

At work in Baden she always wore the brown dress with the cambric trim. It was a kind of inconspicuous uniform, into which she slipped every day in the back room of the shop. By so doing she changed not only her appearance but also her name, because in front of the customers Janki insisted on addressing her as Mademoiselle Hanna. Mademoiselle Hanna took the ladies’ coats and parasols, brought, if the choice between one material and another was taking longer than usual, a chair from the back room, or accompanied a lapdog to the nearest corner. And she handed out tea, not the proper, dark brown, sugary tea they drank at home in Endingen, but a thin, weak infusion for which she had to fetch hot water from the brewery next door, before serving it in tiny cups. Something that was taken for granted in Paris was an unheard-of novelty in Baden and soon, for the few families who constituted the better circles of the little town, it was considered the height of elegance to drop in for a little cup with Frenchman Meijer, to chat for a quarter of an hour, ask to see a few bolts of material more for the sake of entertainment than because one really needed something. Of course one bought, too; one could hardly steal the time of that good man who had been through so much.

The till alone, for which Janki had actually wanted a clerk in the first place, was not within Mademoiselle Hanna’s territory. He himself attended to the financial side of things, and since Salomon’s violent words he did so very secretively, even though in the evening Chanele, who had been present at all his sales, could have told him to the franc exactly what he had taken that day. The profits were considerable.

Chanele had always been quiet, but Mademoiselle Hanna was practically mute. She said ‘yes’ and ‘no’, she smiled politely when it was expected of her, and did everything to make herself as invisible as she was useful. She attended, whether she was asked to or not, to the tiniest matters, and had usually finished things by the time they occurred to Janki. Only once, when he asked her, using his constant argument that this was how Monsieur Delormes had always done things, to greet the customers with a curtsy, did she steadfastly refuse. They even had an argument about the matter, and it was only when Chanele said she would rather scrub the floors at home that Janki finally gave in.