Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘It’s time for the maid to finish work,’ Mimi thought out loud, ‘and the front door will be locked. Pinchas, would you…?’

‘Of course. More than happy.’

‘Don’t stir yourself, Uncle Pinchas,’ Hinda said quickly, and if anyone suspected anything more than simple helpfulness behind her words, then that wasn’t her problem.

Zalman Kamionker just stopped in the open doorway and looked at her expectantly.

Just stopped.

‘Is there anything else?’ Hinda asked at last.

‘I’m waiting for the dress. So that I can sew the sleeve back on.’

‘That’s out of the question.’

‘I’m a good stitcher.’

‘Be that as it may.’

‘The best double cap stitch in New York.’

‘No, I said.’

‘I’m a peaceful person and I will not argue with you. But if you give me the dress now, I can come by tomorrow and bring it back to you.’

‘No!’

‘As you wish,’ said Zalman Kamionker. ‘I’ll come by tomorrow anyway.’ And he laughed with big white teeth and went into the night, with his hands in his pockets.

Poplars grew on either side, haughty, self-contained trees that cast no shadows. It was a cloudless day, and even though it was only May the sun glowed as if it were trying to burn a hole in the sky.

Chanele was dressed far too warmly. And she had, quite out of character, spent a long time thinking about what to wear that day, she had stood by her own wardrobe as if by a stranger’s, had tried to see herself with the eyes of a stranger, no, not a stranger, different eyes, eyes that might be the same colour as her own, who knows, it was possible.

It was possible.

When Hinda had her tonsils taken out that time, she had been given a paper doll by way of consolation, the cardboard figure of an angelically blonde girl in a white blouse, surrounded by a whole wreath of different dresses. Its colours were slightly faded, because the sheet had been in the window of the stationer’s for a long time, but that only made the dresses all the more elegant. You could cut them out and fold them up and put them on the paper girl, so she looked different every time and had different plans, going shopping in town one time, another time going to a ball or to her own wedding.

Faced with her own wardrobe, Chanele had felt like that cardboard figure. A toy.

In the end she had opted for a grey travelling outfit, a practical dress for all weathers one could put on all by oneself, and on which even small flecks of dust from the locomotive would not be noticed. The dress had big, brown pockets with brown borders on either side, although they were only for decoration and you couldn’t put anything in them. She hadn’t brought a suitcase; she had only packed a bag of absolute necessities. ‘You’re travelling like a serving girl,’ Janki had said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’

‘No, I have to do this one all on my own,’ she had replied, and perhaps that had been a mistake.

The poplars stood on either side like sentries.

In the little hotel whose address Janki had written down for her, she had not at first been given a very friendly welcome. Hoteliers are used to gauging the importance of a guest by the amount of luggage they have. But then she had given her name, and the porter, a cheap popular edition of Herr Strähle, had personally ushered her into his room with ‘Bienvenue, Madame Meijer’, and ‘Quel honneur, Madame Meijer’. Janki seemed to be a valued guest here, even though his business didn’t bring him to Strasbourg very often.

But what did she know about Janki’s business?

The room smelled of withered flowers, as if at a goyish levaya. For a whole sleepless night the dress hung before her eyes on its hanger, an alien body that she would just have to slip into the following morning to become someone else.

She just didn’t know who.

The fabric was far too heavy. Everything was far too heavy. The shirt stuck to her body, like the wet canvas that Golde had wrapped her in back in the old days when she had a fever, so tightly that she couldn’t move her arms, that she got scared and tried to wriggle free, to hit her arms out and tear at everything. Until Golde turned it into a game, a test of courage. Mimi, even if she was perfectly healthy, was also wrapped up, and then the two girls lay side by side, and every time Chanele held out longer than Mimi did, every time, and was so proud that she forgot her fear and even her illness.

In the hotel they had told her to take a cab, it was too far to travel on foot, but she still had them explain the directions to her, through the city and out of the city. She had brought nothing but her handbag, a simple linen bag with which Mimi would never have been seen dead.

The bow-fronted houses here leaned curiously into the street. Chanele bought an apple from a market stall, but then threw it into the gutter after the first bite. She stopped for a long time in front of the cathedral and couldn’t have said a thing about it afterwards.

When she had reached the edge of the city, where the houses grew smaller and the vegetable gardens bigger, she also stopped in places where there was nothing at all to see. She wanted to gain time, she wanted to postpone the encounter for which she had waited so patiently.

As a child, of course, as a child she had dreamed of it, she had imagined herself into all the fairy stories, she was the child who was lost, the one who was found, she had put her foot in the glass slipper and it had fit, it had fit her and her alone, she had slept for a hundred years behind a hedge of thorns until the prince came and recognised her as his princess.

As a child you can simply dream up things you don’t know.

But she was now forty-one years old.

Without being aware of it, Chanele had begun to count her steps — ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight — and once she was aware of it, she couldn’t silence the voices in her head.

Ninety-nine, a hundred.

In the military, she knew this from Janki, they counted like that to make unbearably long marches manageable. ‘I’ll survive for another thousand steps. Another hundred.’

Back in the days when she had marched by Janki’s side from Endingen to Baden, and from Baden to Endingen, her journey had never seemed so long.

The avenue was not designed for people who came on foot. It was a road for coaches and horses, for noble men and grand gestures, a path from the past.

Past.

She had once asked Golde about it, just once, and Golde had sucked her lower lip into her mouth and stroked her hair and said, ‘It was the Lord God.’

Whenever someone doesn’t know the answer, it’s always the Lord God.

Perhaps she should pray.

But a prayer just because you’re scared is nothing but counting your steps to make a difficult journey easier.

Shema. Yisrael. Adonai. Eloheinu.

A hundred and thirty-four. A hundred and thirty-five. A hundred and thirty-six.

If Salomon were here now, he would find a meaning for each number.

What is the numerical value of fear?

The avenue between the trees which provided no shade rose slowly to a mound behind where the row of poplar trees seemed to sink into the ground, only the trunk of the first, then the haughty branches of the next.

From the mound you could see the asylum.

Little remained of the castle’s former elegance of the castle. An ungainly building of yellow and red brick spread out from the old white stone façade, the wealthy associate of an old established firm. The red bricks were arranged in the form of gable windows and turrets, so that the new building, for all its modern functionality, had a vaguely castle-like quality, as if it were mocking its neighbour and its old-fashioned demeanour.