Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

It was at that point that he began to hiss, at which the words ‘spoilt little girl’ and ‘you can’t do business sitting on your tochus’ were uttered, and Chanele in her kitchen, probably unlike Janki, was not at all surprised when Mimi abruptly stopped crying and hissed back that a wife wasn’t a commodity that you could buy and then do with what you liked until the end of time, and that people who had come here with nothing on their backs, with nothing at all, were in no position to redraft the laws of the land.

If one belongs once and for all in the kitchen, if that is the lot that one has been given in life, then one should do one’s work thoroughly, so Chanele decided that the plates that she had just washed weren’t clean enough, and started all over again from the beginning, purely out of a sense of duty, not, for instance, so that someone who came charging furiously out of the parlour into the kitchen, would find her at work and wouldn’t find themselves wondering whether she might have taken the slightest interest in what was happening in the next room. Certainement pas , isn’t that so, Mimi?’

The good Shabbos plates had to be treated with great care, so she didn’t even look up when the door slammed behind her. That could only be Mimi, who liked to bring to a dramatic conclusion arguments she hadn’t been able to win. At first Chanele didn’t even notice Janki coming into the kitchen, picking up one of the freshly washed glasses and pouring himself some of the Kiddush wine which should really — but one is discreet, of course, and doesn’t want to disturb the young betrothed — have been put back in the cupboard in the parlour ages ago.

‘Can anyone understand a woman?’ asked Janki.

‘Not you.’ Chanele bit her lip, because she hadn’t actually wanted to say anything.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing,’ said Chanele, and rubbed away at a stain that she knew to be a flaw in the stone.

‘Why don’t I understand anything about women?’

‘That’s why.’

‘And excuse me, but how do you know that?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Chanele. ‘I completely forgot I have no eyes. And no ears. And certainly no heart.’

‘Don’t you start!’

‘Start what?’ If you want to do it properly, washing up is not a simple matter, and requires a great deal of concentration.

‘Mimi is so strange today. Is it so bad, working with me in the shop? Tell me!’

‘It depends,’ said Chanele, and examined a plate as carefully as if it had suddenly developed a completely new pattern, ‘depends what you compare it to. Breaking stones is probably harder.’

‘Why did you stop?’

‘I’m more suited to a kitchen. You have to know your place.’

‘You said the long journey…’

‘You choose!’

Janki’s right hand opened and closed again. In order to interpret the gesture, you would have had to study it as long and as closely as Chanele had. His fingers were looking for the walking stick with the lion’s-head handle, which he didn’t have with him because it was Shabbos.

‘I thought you always understood everything,’ said Chanele. ‘Such a clever man. Who has experienced so much. Who was even at the battle of Sedan.’

‘You know very well…’

‘I don’t know anything. I’m stupid. Fit for the kitchen.’

‘You aren’t stupid!’

‘I am!’ said Chanele, with profound conviction. ‘Nobody could possibly be stupider than I am.’

Janki drained his glass of expensive Kiddush wine in one go. ‘Now please explain to me…’

The Shabbos plates went in the cupboard in the parlour. Once it had been washed and dried, it had to be cleared away again. For someone destined by fate for housework, such a thing is more important than chatting to a man engaged to someone else.

Janki hurried after her. ‘What are you doing, in fact?’

‘My work. Does it say anywhere that you have to leave everything lying about the place because some posh gentleman suddenly feels like having a chat?’

‘I’m not a posh gentleman!’

‘Oh, Monsieur Jean, whence this sudden modesty?’

She just wanted to stack the plates on the second shelf from the bottom, and he just wanted her to listen to him at last. That it looked as if she was kneeling in front of him and he was pulling her up to him was just coincidence. And that he went on holding her hands when she was already standing before him meant nothing at all.

‘Chanele, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she wanted to say, cattily and with great detachment. Her voice was supposed to be cold and firm, not cracked and tearful. And she certainly didn’t want to say, ‘I hate you.’ Not in that tone.

‘I don’t understand…’ Janki said for the second time.

‘But it’s true.’ Chanele knew she would regret it, but it felt good, it felt so good not controlling herself for once, not being sensible. ‘You don’t understand anything. You look at a person and the person thinks you like something about them and really… You only ever see what can be useful to you. You knead away at a person and adjust them until they’re what fits your purpose. You call them Mademoiselle Hanna when you want to impress the fine ladies, and Chanele if you need someone to put your dinner on the table. But they’re not all like you, they can’t all suddenly become heroes just by picking up a walking stick and starting to limp. Most people don’t think they can be a soldier one day and trade horses the next and forever adapt and change and always be exactly what happens to be useful. There are people who think you really love them if you treat them as if you do.’

‘You mean Mimi?’

‘Yes,’ said Chanele. ‘I mean Mimi too.’

‘Too?’

‘Yes — do you think I plucked my eyebrows to please your customers?’

Pinchas Pomeranz could have explained to Janki what was going on inside him at that moment. Sometimes you sit for hours over a page of the Gemara, and nothing on it makes any sense at all. You’ve been through the text again and again, you’ve battled through Rashi’s commentaries, and it’s still all incomprehensible, a stormy sea full of words hurled together at random, from which only the names of wise rabbis loom like islands. And then, all of a sudden, the beginning of a sentence shifts in your head, questions and answers divide anew — because the Talmud, like a human being, has no punctuation to make comprehension easier — and everything is illuminating and clear, so simple that you can’t explain to yourself why you didn’t see it that way from the very start. Such moments are lovely, but also frightening, because they make it clear to you how easy it is to be blind with your eyes open.

‘I had no idea,’ said Janki.

‘No,’ said Chanele. ‘You have no idea.’

‘I would never have thought…’

‘No,’ said Chanele, ‘you didn’t think.’

‘But again, I’ve never said anything to you that would have led you to imagine…’

‘No,’ said Chanele, ‘you’ve never said a thing. And even though you’re not going to understand this, Janki Meijer, thinking has nothing to do with it.’

The plates were still on the floor. But even though Chanele had to bend down very low to reach their shelf, it would never have occurred to anybody now to think that she was kneeling in front of Janki.

When she was finished she wanted to leave, but he stood in her way. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Chanele slowly raised her shoulders and just as slowly lowered them. She looked at him with a smile which, now that her eyebrows no longer met in the middle, seemed to float on her face. ‘Make Shabbos with it,’ she said.

Outside the front door was opened and closed again. ‘Your kalleh is leaving,’ said Chanele. ‘You should go after her. Not that you want to put yourself to too much trouble.’