Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘It was a disaster,’ he said.

‘Even though we weren’t thirteen at table?’

‘A social disaster.’

‘There’s something else you should know,’ Chanele began.

But Janki wasn’t listening. ‘A disaster,’ he said over and over again. It sounded like one of the prayers with the many repetitions that one growls to oneself on certain feast days, until the last shred of meaning has been worn away. ‘A disaster that can never be rectified.’

‘Mathilde Lutz told me…’

If, after the defeat at Sedan, Napoleon III had been asked which shirt he wanted to wear the following day, he could not have looked at the questioner with greater contempt. ‘I’m not interested in that,’ said Janki, stressing each syllable individually.

‘Do you understand? I don’t want to know! Right now your little problems with the shop are as unimportant as… as… as…’ In search of a suitable comparison his eye fell on an ashtray. He tipped the mixture of grey ash and wet, chewed cigar butts onto the good damask tablecloth, where it formed a dirty little heap, of the kind that street-sweepers make in the early morning. ‘There!’ he said. ‘That’s how unimportant it is for me right now.’

‘It’s not about the shop,’ said Chanele.

‘I don’t care what it’s about.’ The dramatic gesture — or the stomach powder — seemed to have given him new strength, and the apathetic despair that he had just revealed turned to voluble fury. ‘You weren’t there! You don’t know what has happened! While you were chatting peacefully with the ladies, about sewing or recipes or who knows what all else, while you were having a lovely evening…’

‘Nebbish!’ said Chanele.

‘… while you’ve been enjoying your life, everyone’s been tearing into me. Even Ziltener! And it wasn’t a coincidence, believe me, things like that don’t just happen on their own. They must have agreed in advance! Did you see Rauhut, that toss-pot, that shassgener, whispering with Bugmann? Of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t notice anything like that. They come to my house, they eat my food, they drink my wine, and then…’

‘What’s happened?’

Janki’s fury subsided as quickly as it had flared up. ‘There’s no point,’ he said, and pressed his hand to his body as if he were suffering not from heart-burn but from a deadly wound. ‘You can do what you like, you’re never a part of it.’

‘What a ridiculous party.’ François came into the room with the ostentatiously springy elegance of a ballet dancer who goes on striking poses after the curtain has fallen.

‘Shmul, I need to talk to you straight away about…’

‘One moment,’ said François and looked searchingly around. ‘So much politeness makes you thirsty.’

‘Right now!’

‘I will be at your disposal straight away.’

And he had gone out again.

‘It’s all Salomon’s fault,’ Janki complained. ‘If he hadn’t got involved! Why, today of all days, did he have to…?’

‘Ask him!’

Salomon had come in, his new shirt unbuttoned so that the tzitzits of his arba kanfes hung over his trousers. ‘It’s a shame the word “tie” doesn’t appear in the Bible,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it would have the same numerical value as “goyim naches”.’ Goyim naches are all the things that non-Jews for some unfathomable reason find pleasurable.

‘It’s your fault,’ said Janki.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Salomon replied, ‘but if it makes you feel better I’ll happily take the blame for it.’

‘Why did you have to attack him like that? Councillor Bugmann of all people.’

‘He asked a question, and I answered it for him. Should I have been rude?’

‘You shouldn’t have been there at all!’

‘Believe me,’ said Salomon Meijer and smiled peacefully, ‘if I’d known who you’d invited I’d have stayed in Endingen. I prefer my shnorrers.’

‘You called them hypocrites!’

Salomon spread his arms. ‘Nu,’ he said. And in this instance it meant, ‘I’ve grown as old as this and I’m not allowed to tell the truth?’

‘What did you want here anyway?’

‘To bring this letter to Chanele.’ Salomon drew a piece of paper, folded several times and no longer quite clean, out of his trouser pocket. ‘I’ll soon have been carrying it around for two months.’

‘It must be an anonymous letter,’ was Chanele’s first thought. ‘About the pregnant salesgirl.’

But it was something quite different.

‘Since Golde, may she rest in peace, is no longer with us,’ said Salomon, ‘every day I have the feeling that I have to put things in order. My life. Has it ever occurred to you that the word “viduy”, the confession of a sin, has exactly twice the numerical value of the word “love”? That is trying to tell us: only if we admit our mistakes…’

‘Leave me in peace with your gematria!’ cried Janki.

Salomon laid the letter on the table and took Chanele by both hands. ‘Throughout your life I have always been in your debt,’ he said.

‘You have always been good to me.’

‘Perhaps this will change your opinion,’ said Salomon. ‘Here…’ He held the letter out to her. The paper rustled as she unfolded it.

There was complete silence in the room.

Until Shmul came in. He had opened the outsize champagne bottle that Strähle had brought, and was drinking it from the neck. ‘I know,’ he said, no longer elegant, ‘I know this stuff’s not kosher. But I need it now.’ He planted himself, legs apart, in front of Chanele. ‘So. What did you want to say to me?’

‘Nothing,’ Chanele replied. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

Mimi loved spoiling Hinda.

The girl wasn’t really her niece, admittedly, and strictly speaking she wasn’t even a relative, but who else could you call ma fillette if you didn’t have any children of your own.

Had it been meant to be, back then, it would have been a boy. ‘It was a boy,’ they told her, and with that single sentence a living future had become a dead past. Golde tried to console her by telling her of her own misfortune, but Mimi didn’t listen. During those days she hated her mother, who of all the qualities she could have left to her, had passed on precisely this one: the inability to conceive a son. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, the doctors said and nodded encouragingly. ‘Next time everything might be fine.’ Mimi didn’t believe them, They just wanted to comfort her, they wanted to prettify the gloomy picture of her life, but she wasn’t one of those weak people that you have to lie to, not her, she could look facts in the face, and if that was how it was to be, then that was how it was to be.

And she had been right.

Pinchas, who was a dreamer, a hardworking shochet, but a dreamer, told her stories about women who had become mothers only after ten or twenty years, and she let him slog away at the topic and thought, ‘Just go on talking!’ She didn’t even wonder whether he got his chochmes out of the Talmud or from one of the many newspapers that he read every day. He loved arguing, except it didn’t change the facts. It was the way it was.

She had adjusted her life according to it. Childlessness filled her days as completely as motherhood would have done. She brought up her sorrow, let it grow and develop, became ever more familiar with its demands, sometimes struggled with it, as with a child that threatens to suffocate you with its constant demands for attention, then pressed it to her again and couldn’t have lived without it, not for so much as a minute. When other women talked about their children or even brought them on visits — often they didn’t — then Mimi’s fingertips drew circles on her temples and she talked about her migraine.