Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The woman with the little glasses and her arrogant neighbour were mother and daughter and came to every séance, because Madame Rosa had discovered that they both had quite special clairvoyant powers, which the circle of hands required to make contact with the other world. The veiled woman didn’t take part in the conversation, just dabbed her eyes with a little black lace handkerchief and sometimes said into a silence, ‘Yes, yes.’

Madame Rosa was the only one to stay seated. She looked, to use a term from Mimi’s lexicon, très ordinaire , like a washerwoman after a long day in hot steam or like Christine after the last course of a big dinner. The enamel medallion on her turban represented an open eye. She was, as Mimi explained on the way to the Alpenquai, a distant relative of the upholsterer who owned the house, had discovered her special abilities only very late and only by chance, and in principle accepted no money for running the séances; one just gave the gaunt, grey woman something to cover the costs, with no compulsion at all, one could give what one wished.

When they were saying goodbye, Madame Rosa had rested a cabbage-smelling hand on Hinda’s cheek, had looked at her and then said with a shake of her head, ‘Today is a very special day for you, my child.’

They had gone down the stairs — the baby had stopped crying, and the dog was barking only very faintly — and when they stepped out of the workshop door and breathed fresh air again, Hinda had laughed so hard that she had thrown herself into one of the broken chairs and kicked her feet.

On the way through the city her laughter had kept bubbling up again, and in the end it had infected Mimi, too. They both giggled like schoolgirls sharing a secret, and even — ‘But you mustn’t say that at home, it will not be considered polite!’ — had to find the ladies’ convenience on Bürkliplatz, because Mimi was weeping with laughter, and without freshly powdering her face she couldn’t show herself in the elegant surroundings of the Palm Garden.

The Palm Garden in the Tonhalle was the most fashionable place in Zurich to enjoy a cup of hot chocolate. Well, in fact, the hall of the Hotel Baur en Ville on Paradeplatz was perhaps a little more exclusive, but it attracted a quite different clientele, predominantly foreign travellers, and Mimi had never understood why one should put on one’s best for people one didn’t even know. In Palm Garden one always saw familiar faces, particularly in the afternoon, when the orchestra played on the low platform, ‘under the baton of the eminent conductor Fleur-Vallée’, as it said in the advertisements. Monsieur Fleur-Vallée was a regular customer at the butcher’s shop, and his real name was Blumental.

The four huge palm trees that gave the café its name grew from metal-studded tubs which had to be turned every three months by the whole staff, all pulling together and people shouting ‘heave!’, so that they didn’t grow towards the light from the plate-glass window on all sides. Mimi knew that from Monsieur Fleur-Vallée, who had complained that they actually expected him, a sensitive artist, to join in with such a coarse operation.

For someone who didn’t know, the Palm Garden might have looked like an undifferentiated sea of little round tables, washed together here and then into random groups of islands for larger parties. But just as one did not move just anywhere when choosing a place to live, but sought the proximity of one’s peers — small craftsmen in the Old Town, workers in the recently incorporated district of Wiedikon, Jews around the synagogue on Löwenstrasse — here too one had to respect a clear social demarcation which might not have been recorded anywhere, but with which the habitués were nonetheless very familiar.

The most sought-after seats were on the bright south front — ‘but not right by the window,’ Mimi had explained to Hinda, ‘that’s cheap. It shouldn’t look as if we need to display ourselves in a shop window.’ They found a seat in the second row, not too far from the wide entrance; they wanted to be able to see who was coming and going, after all. In the Palm Garden there was a quarter of elderly couples, an arrondissement of newspaper readers, and so on. Right in front of the orchestra platform sat students in their best clothes and young ladies who wanted to be near them. Non-residents had to content themselves with a seat in the no-man’s-land somewhere in between.

Today there were a lot of untypical guests in the Palm Garden, noisy, often colourful figures, ‘not really elegant people’, as Mimi established after a glance at the frayed collars and hats that hadn’t been brushed for ages. Around their tables, on which pamphlets were stacked, the chairs were crammed so close together that the heavily laden waiters could hardly make their way through. Some of the men hadn’t even sat down, but, bottles and glasses in hand, were getting in the way, gesticulating and talking at one another.

‘Those are the socialists,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée. After his own arrangement of popular folk tunes and the concluding ‘Circassian Tattoo’, he had joined Frau Pomeranz and her guest at their table, and had greeted them both by kissing their hand, once again prompting Hinda to burst out laughing. When he was conducting on the platform, the conductor looked like a figure from a musical box, all tiny, regular and finely turned out. Seen from close to he was just a little man with a big nose, not the curved, Levantine kind that people like to ascribe to Jews, but swollen through illness and purple in colour, a defect that Monsieur Fleur-Valléee attempted to conceal with a lot of powder. Consequently the lapels of the tailcoat that he wore as a work uniform always bore a white dusting.

‘The socialists,’ he repeated, pulling a face as if a trumpeter had parped in the middle of one of his finest pianissimo passages. ‘They are holding their world congress here in the Tonhalle. It’s been going on for three days. People without any feeling for music. They even go on talking during “Åses Tod”, and that’s really almost like Kol Nidre.’

As if to confirm his words, at that moment the discussion at the crammed-together tables rose to a dissonant crescendo. ‘They’ll come to blows again,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’

‘Where do these people come from?’ Mimi asked.

‘From Germany,’ said Monsieur Fleur-Vallée, drawing a loop in the air with his index and middle fingers pressed together each time he named a country, as if conducting a map. ‘From Austria-Hungary. From France. From England. From Italy. From Russia. From Poland. And from America, I assume.’

‘You do seem to know a lot about these socialists,’ said Mimi, threatening him with her finger, a saucy gesture that she had copied from the soubrette in the municipal theatre.

‘I have established it through music,’ said the little conductor, rising on tiptoe as if pride at his own cleverness had made him taller. ‘By means of a little exercise from my days as first violinist with the spa orchestra in Bad Kissingen. A pot-pourri of national anthems, performed in the style of Rossini, all very light and scherzando , but with very daring transitions. Do you play the piano at all?’ he asked Hinda without transition.

‘Sadly not.’

‘That’s lucky, believe me. Very lucky! Stay that way! It’s better not to play an instrument than to do it in a dilettante manner. So many times have I had to accompany so-called music lovers at parties. Lovers, heavens above!’ He threw his hand to his face in dramatic despair. It looked as if he was trying to hide his swollen nose. ‘But what was I about to…? The national anthems, of course. Listen.’ Still standing by the table, he leaned down to the two women, like a waiter taking an order, and slowly began to sing the Austrian Kaiser anthem. ‘“Gott erhalte, Gott beschütze unsern Kaiser, unser Land, mächtig durch des Glaubens Stütze führt er uns mit weiser Hand! Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive.” A daring transition, don’t you think?’