Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘You wanted to ask me something?’

‘Of course,’ said Janki, embarrassed. ‘I wanted to ask you… How much of a dowry do you think Mimi will get?’

Salomon only haggled out of cattle-trading habit, without any fire. With this future son-in-law, trading had stopped being fun. Janki had turned up formally, almost solemnly, for the discussion, he came from his room in yontevdik new trousers and his freshly brushed uniform jacket and marched as stiffly down the stairs as a general handing over a conquered fortress. He held his hand out to Salomon as if to a stranger, leaned his walking stick with the lion’s-head handle carefully against the table and then sat ramrod-straight on his chair without touching the back.

Twenty thousand, he said, that would be the ideal figure. The textile store had luckily been very well received in the better circles, but the plain people of the town seemed to be put off by the exclusiveness of the clientele, probably because they were worried that they wouldn’t find anything to suit their purses in the French Drapery. But Switzerland wasn’t France, and Baden certainly wasn’t Paris, elegant people were thin on the ground, so it seemed appropriate for him, Janki, for once not to follow the model of Monsieur Delormes, but to address his wares to a wider, even a peasant audience. That would, however, make the opening of additional branches necessary; by a happy chance the possibility existed of taking over the entire ground floor of the ideally situated house with the Red Shield, which belonged to the wealthy Schnegg family, with the option of buying the building itself. But even though he had given the matter his most serious consideration, he did not want to give up the shop on the Vordere Metzggasse, but rather to attempt to run both shops, each aimed at a different clientele, in parallel to one another. With the right staff — this too was an expense to be borne in mind — this could certainly be accomplished. He would in any case have to reorganise himself in this respect, after Chanele had found the daily journey to Baden too exhausting, and decided henceforth to remain in Endingen again. Apart from rent, equipment and staff, the cost of a larger order from Paris would have to be taken into account, and to some extent the fittings for the new shop. Of course that could all be done with sixteen, or rather, on a tight margin, even fifteen and a half thousand, but Mimi — it was the first time that her name was mentioned in the context of this wedding proposal — had expressed a desire to settle in Baden, and the furnishing of a more or less suitable dwelling could not be had for nothing. All in all: twenty thousand.

Salomon offered ten.

‘Your only daughter!’ said Janki.

‘If I had two,’ said Salomon, ‘I would have to divide the sum.’

Janki conceded that he might be able to try to raise the outlay required for larger amount of goods required for the new shop not in advance but, as a customer who was no longer entirely unknown, at least partly on credit, which would reduce the need for cash so that even with, let’s say sixteen thousand…

Salomon offered eleven.

‘You will be thought of as a tightwad,’ said Janki.

‘In my shop,’ said Salomon, ‘such a reputation can only be useful.’

One could of course, Janki reflected, keep the furnishing of the apartment as simple as possible, although he was reluctant to disappoint Mimi on a point that was so important to her. On the other hand some of her desires were very extravagant, he had to admit that, however much he loved her, like for example this fixed idea that the curtains in the drawing room had to be shantung silk, a material entirely unsuited to the purpose. If one were to cut back very severely in that area, one might perhaps with fourteen thousand…

Salomon offered twelve, and Janki shook on it.

Salomon had haggled for longer about many a cow from which twenty or, on a good day, thirty francs might have been made than he haggled over his daughter’s dowry, and he was disappointed by his easy victory. He would have wished Mimi to have a husband with a more precise grasp of the realities of business negotiation. From the very start he had set aside the sum of eighteen thousand francs for his daughter’s nedinye, not because eighteen is the numerical value of the lucky Chai, but simply because that sum seemed appropriate within his possibilities. Anything a son-in-law negotiated down from there, he had decided without talking to Golde on the matter, and even long before Janki’s unexpected appearance in Endingen, anything left over from eighteen thousand would go to Chanele, for whose well-being he felt entirely responsible, albeit with little emotion. But he had not expected it to be six thousand francs, enough to provide Chanele with a respectable match.

So the family was called in. Golde came sailing out of the kitchen and wanted to hug Janki straight away, but hesitated because Mimi had precedence in this respect, and finally she just stood there, hopping from one foot to the other, sucking on her lower lip. Chanele followed more slowly, wiping her hands on her apron. Her ‘Mazel Tov!’ to Janki was, to Salomon’s amazement, no more cordial than a ‘Hello’ to a chance acquaintance.

Mimi, in her room, seemed not to have heard all the shouting and had to be fetched. When she at last appeared in her mother’s wake, she looked almost insulted by the disturbance, when she turned her cheek to her fiancé for the traditional first kiss she showed neither embarrassment nor extravagant joy, and it was only when Golde held her in an apparently endless embrace that she allowed herself a triumphant glance at Chanele over Golde’s head.

‘Now that you’re a kalleh, a bride, I will have to get used to calling you Miriam,’ Salomon said with a chuckle.

With a new and fully adult gesture, his daughter brushed her curls from her forehead. ‘I’d rather stay as Mimi. It’s more unusual than Miriam. N’est-ce pas , Jean?’

‘Jean?’ thought Salomon. ‘Nu, so be it: Jean.’

The wedding was arranged for 17 December, a date when the farmers would be too busy too busy preparing for Christmas and New Year to need the services of a cattle-trader. Janki, for whom nothing could ever happen quickly enough, would have happily chosen an earlier time, but hoped — the house with the Red Shield would not be empty for ever — he would be able to ask Salomon for an advance on the dowry. In her head Golde was already drawing up lists of all the things that still needed to be organised for Mimi — clothes! Sheitel! All the monograms that would have to be embroidered into the linen for the trousseau! — and had already bitten her lip bloody out of pure excitement.

Only Mimi seemed as cool and calm as if she got engaged very day. In fact she had imagined this event with Anne-Kathrin so often and in such detail in the past that the actual process was almost a disappointment. Now at last she was standing next to Janki, they were what one calls a handsome couple, she even whispered something in his ear, but the two of them didn’t, Salomon thought, look properly happy. On the other hand when he thought back to his own engagement to Golde, to young, dainty, irresistible Golde… ‘Nu!’ he said out loud, and in this case it meant: ‘It will be what it is; one cannot expect too much in life.’

‘There’s one thing you must know,’ Mimi whispered in Janki’s ear. ‘I will not serve your customers. I’m not an employee.’

Since Chanele, without supplying a sensible reason, no longer wanted to work in his shop and had even rejected the offer to raise her admittedly small wage, everyday life had become hard for Janki. If he had to do something in town, as he did increasingly often because of the planned expansion, he had to close his shop and then he didn’t have a quite minute to himself. In the middle of a conversation with a joiner or a glazier — he wanted to put in big shop windows like the ones they now had in Paris — he suddenly imagined a customer deciding to buy her fabrics somewhere else from now on because of the closed shop door. Then he always concluded his discussion quite abruptly and hurried back to Metzggasse, where of course no one was waiting outside the door. In the end nothing had been done properly and half the day was lost.