Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘Mishpocha, then.’ Mimi sounded strangely disappointed.

‘But very distant mishpocha,’ said Janki and smiled at her.

‘He has lovely white teeth,’ she thought.

‘My father, Schmul Meijer,’ explained Janki, ‘actually came from Blotzheim—’

‘Exactly!’ said Salomon.

‘—and moved to Guebwiller, because my mother owned an inn there, which the peasants particularly liked to go to. In Guebwiller there’s a market every week. That is: the pub belonged to my grandfather, of course, but he wanted to be a scholar, and when his daughter married, he passed everything to the young couple. I only ever saw him in the pub room sitting over a big tome, at his table by the window. He murmured to himself as he studied, and when I was a little boy I thought he could do magic.’

His voice became hoarse again, and Chanele quickly refilled his glass.

‘But he couldn’t do magic,’ said Janki, when he had drunk. ‘During the cholera epidemic of 1866 he wrote amulets and hung them above all the doors. Except that the disease probably couldn’t read his handwriting.’

‘He died,’ said Golde, and it wasn’t a question.

‘They all died.’ Janki stirred his finger in his glass and stared into it, as if nothing in the world could be more interesting than a whirlpool of boiled camomile blossoms. ‘In three days. Father. Mother. Grandfather. The old man held out the longest. Lay on his bed, his eyes wide open. Not blinking. He probably thought the angel of death could do nothing to him as long as he stared it in the face. But in the end he blinked.’ He paused and then added, still without looking up from his glass, ‘I can still smell their beds. Cholera doesn’t smell of roses.’ He shook a drop from his finger, as one does at Seder, when one gives away ten drops of the feast wine so as not to be too happy about the ten plagues of the Egyptians.

‘I could have a son his age,’ thought Golde. ‘And he could be an orphan already. Praised be the Judge of Truth.’

‘You have no brothers and sisters?’ she asked, and it was the first time anyone in the house had called him Du , not Ihr , as they would have addressed a stranger.

‘It isn’t easy to be the only one,’ Janki replied, and Mimi nodded, without noticing. ‘That is: it isn’t hard. One is responsible only for oneself, and that is fine.’

Mimi was still nodding.

‘Everyone expected me to go on running the pub. I wasn’t yet twenty, and I was to spend my whole life pouring schnapps, washing glasses, cleaning tables and laughing at the stories of the drunk peasants. I didn’t want that. But on the other hand: that was what my parents had left me. If it was good enough for them — who was I to want something else?’

‘So you made up your mind?’

Janki shook his head. ‘It was taken away from me. People stopped coming to the inn. Too many people had died in the house, and the suspicious peasants no longer found it quite heimish. I got a decent price for it, not very good, not very bad, and with that I went to Paris.’

‘Why Paris?’ asked Chanele, who had listened in silence until that moment.

‘Do you know a better city?’ he asked back, folded his hands behind his head and leaned far back. ‘Does anyone know a better city?’

It was a question that no one in this kitchen could answer.

‘I wanted to get away from Guebwiller. I wanted to be something that would mean I never had to go back there. Something special, something strange.’

Explorer , thought Mimi. Pirate .

‘I wanted to go where the masters are. Just as some people go to Lithuania or Poland because a rabbi that they want to emulate teaches there. Except I wasn’t looking for a rabbi.’

‘But?’

‘A tailor.’

If Janki had said ‘a knacker’ or ‘a gravedigger’, the disappointment around the table could not have been greater. A tailor was more or less the most ordinary thing they could think of, there were tailors on every street-corner, a tailor was neighbour Oggenfuss, a lanky, short-sighted man who sat on his table all day and was bossed around by his wife. A tailor? And that was why he had gone to Paris?

Janki laughed when he saw their baffled faces, he laughed so hard that his coughing started up again and his face contorted. He held the end of his bandage in front of his mouth like a handkerchief and gesticulated for more tea with his other hand. When the attack had settled down again, he went on speaking in a very quiet, careful voice, like someone setting a sprained foot hesitantly on the ground.

‘I ask your forgiveness. It’s the cold. And the hunger. But at least I’m still alive. That is: I’ve even been living very well since I’ve been here. What was I going to say?’

‘A tailor,’ said Mimi, holding the word between pointed fingers.

‘Of course. A tailor in Paris, you must know, is not simply someone who stitches a pair of trousers together always using the same cut, or, when making a skirt, considers how much fabric he can have left over. Of course, there are such tailors, and there are many of them. But the ones I mean, the real ones, are something quite different. It’s like… like…’ He looked around the kitchen in search of a suitable comparison. ‘Like a sunrise compared with this oil lamp. These men are famous artists, you understand. Great gentlemen. They don’t bow to their customers. They never pick up a needle themselves. They have other people to do that.’

‘A tailor is a tailor,’ said Salomon.

‘Perhaps in the village. But in a proper city. Not,’ he made his voice higher, as one does in the minyan, when after the naming of the divine names everyone is supposed to reply with a blessing, ‘not if one is called François Delormes.’

No one in the house had ever heard of François Delormes.

‘I have worked for him. He was the best, a prince among tailors. Someone who could even afford to say no to the emperor.’

‘Well,’ said Salomon, who was used to being suspicious if someone over-praised a deal to him, ‘it can hardly have been the emperor.’

‘It was his valet. The personal valet of Napoleon the Third. He came to Monsieur Delormes and ordered a tailcoat. For the emperor. A midnight blue tailcoat with silver embroidery. Says Delormes: “No.” “Why not?” inquires the valet. And Delormes replies: “Blue doesn’t suit him.” Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘It can’t have happened.’

‘I was there. I have held in my own hand the swatch of fabric chosen by the valet.’

‘Midnight blue,’ said Mimi quietly. It sounded even more elegant than ‘dove grey’.

‘So you’re a tailor?’ Chanele, who had been standing the whole time, now sat down at the table with the others. ‘What sort of tailor?’

‘None at all,’ said Janki. ‘I soon realised that I’m not cut out for it. I may have the skill, but not the patience. I am not a patient man. All day one stitch and another stitch and another stitch, and all exactly the same length — it’s not for me. No, I worked in the fabric store. I was there when the customers came. Showed them the patterns. The bolts of material. We had a selection… There was shantung silk in more than thirty different colours.’

‘Shantung silk,’ Mimi thought, and knew that she would never like another fabric more for the rest of her life.

‘I learned a lot,’ said Janki. ‘About materials. About fashion. Above all about the people who can afford both. And they began to get to know me too. I started to become someone. Somebody advised me to set up on my own. Wanted to lend me money. In the end I rented a little shop with a little flat. And then I made my mistake.’

‘Mistake?’ asked Golde, startled.