Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

It hadn’t been hard to find a girl from the country to come and clean the shop in the evening after closing time, but as he didn’t dare to leave a stranger alone with all those expensive fabrics, he always stood there impatiently as she worked, was in the way and at the same time felt irritation mounting in him daily. Monsieur Delormes had never had to concern himself with such trivia.

Janki’s search for a clerk was more difficult than expected. The only people who responded to his advertisement in the Tagblatt were young pups who smelled penetratingly of patchouli or whatever else they had poured on their handkerchiefs to mask the smell of their unwashed necks, their hair plastered with too much pomade at the temples and their clothes of such vain tastelessness that they could never have been put before a discerning clientele. They knew nothing at all about fabrics, they couldn’t tell French muslin from English tweed and showed so little interest in the material that it was quite clear: they didn’t care whether they were selling fabrics or cigars, silk or soap. A single applicant, one Oskar Ziltener, was different from the others; he was a little older, conservatively dressed, and he asked questions that revealed a surprising knowledge of the field. But Janki thought he had once seen him in passing in Schmucki & Sons textile store, and so, for fear of providing a competitor with information, did not take him on.

In the evening, when he returned at last to Endingen, he was exhausted and bad tempered; the walk, which he had undertaken without much effort for all those months, now struck him as endlessly long, probably, he said to himself in an attempt to explain the change, because it was autumn now and he had to look for most of the path in the dark. There was no food waiting for him in the kitchen now either, and more than once he went to bed hungry. When he mentioned this to Chanele, she said quite amicably that she didn’t want to deprive her friend Mimi of the opportunity to spoil her fiancé herself.

But Mimi was usually asleep, or had locked herself in her room. She spent exhausting days with tailors who had to be watched over so that they copied the patterns from the Journal des Modes properly, and with the wig-maker, not the quite good one from Schwäbisch Hall — Salomon had not approved the money for her — but the one from Lengnau who, if you weren’t careful, made you a sheitel in which you looked as old as Mother Feigele.

But above all Mimi had social obligations, in so far as one could speak of society in a village like Endingen. It was neither customary nor necessary formerly to announce an engagement; no official proclamation could have kept pace with the speed of rumour. When Mimi walked through the village, and for the first few days there were many opportunities for such walks, people spoke to her and congratulated her on all sides. Furthermore, an old superstition from the days when people still believed in the evil eye, the name of her future husband was never mentioned, since to utter his name with hers before the wedding would have brought misfortune. People only talked about ‘the man-to-be’ or ‘the happy one’, and Mimi, enjoying every second at the centre of attention, became increasingly practised at turning her head away bashfully as a shy young bride, and even blushing.

At last, and she couldn’t have said whether she was looking forward to the moment or dreading it, she bumped into Pinchas. She saw him coming from a long way off, long and gaunt, with a heavy package on his shoulder, his knee bending under its weight with every step he took. When he came closer, the package turned out to be a quarter of beef wrapped in sackcloth. One end protruded from the canvas, the obscene wound of a freshly amputated soldier.

They both stopped. Mimi arranged the curls at the back of her neck, a gesture that allowed her to bend her torso backwards and thus set off her figure to good effect. Pinchas vacillated back and forth as if he wasn’t sure whether to walk towards Mimi or run away from her. But perhaps it was also partly because of the weight he was carrying. You could tell by his face that he was formulating one sentence after another, rejecting and choking it back, and immediately assembling the next one, which wasn’t right either. In his cheeks, under his thin beard, muscles twitched as if his jaw first had to grind the words to tiny pieces, and his Adam’s apple rose and fell as if it were having difficulty swallowing.

At last it was Mimi who opened the conversation. ‘What were you thinking of,’ she said reproachfully, ‘sending Singer to my house?’

‘I wanted…’ Pinchas gulped again. ‘I wanted you to know…’

‘I’ve known for a long time, Pinchas.’ She smiled at him and felt like that other Mimi, the one with the book who went with strange men without marrying them. ‘But as I told you…’

‘Our hearts don’t sing the same tune.’

He had remembered the sentence and repeated it now, a pupil who may not have understood his lesson, but has learned it conscientiously by heart.

‘That’s exactly how it is, Pinchas.’ A shame that Anne-Kathrin couldn’t see her now, very much the grande dame, at once friendly and unapproachable.

‘But…’ Pinchas was swaying more and more under his burden. ‘But… A person can learn to sing.’

‘It’s too late.’ The sentence had appeared in many novels, and Mimi had always been touched by its finality.

‘I would like…’ said Pinchas. At one spot oxblood had seeped through the sackcloth and was slowly spreading. Mimi found herself being reminded of the bandage that Janki had worn on the very first evening. ‘Luckily it’s not my blood,’ he had said.

‘I would like…’ Pinchas repeated. ‘His tongue was playing in the gap between his teeth as if it had a life of its own. ‘I need to talk to you again. Can’t we meet? In the gazebo, at your friend’s house? Please.’

‘That’s impossible!’ But then Mimi saw that the bloodstain had already spread to Pinchas’s shoulder, and for some reason she was so touched by the sight of it that she whispered something to him that she hadn’t even wanted to say.

Pinchas would have reached his arms out to her, but he had to hold on tight to the quarter of beef.

It wasn’t until the weekend that Mimi and Janki found time for one another. On Shabbos morning they walked to the synagogue side by side, Mimi with her hair pinned up, you had to exploit the fact while you were still allowed to show your own hair. They arrived as a couple and, when they entered the square, raised their heads together to look at the village clock, which in Endingen is mounted on the synagogue tower. From the women’s shul Mimi could then watch Janki being summoned to read from the Torah, the first after Kauhen and Levi. After he had sung the blessing, a woman leaned forward to her and said, ‘He has a beautiful voice.’

From her seat in the front row, right next to Golde, looking through the grid she could also see Pinchas and his father, two long, narrow figures who looked even more haggard in their white prayer shawls than they did in everyday life. Pinchas often stood alone at his lectern, because Naftali, the shammes, was constantly busy and scurried around the synagogue, here reminding someone of a mitzvah, there interrupting a noisy private conversation with a violent ‘Sha!’ None the less, Pinchas, who must have known exactly where she habitually sat, never turned his head upwards, as many men apparently stretch their necks at random before flicking to the next passage in the prayer book. He had pulled the tallis over his head and was rocking back and forth with concentration, someone with a very special request to make of God.

Mimi and Janki did not walk back together. It was the custom for the women always to leave the synagogue before the end of the service, so that the men, when they came home hungry, didn’t have to wait for their meal, the traditional Shabbos seder.