Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Regula watched the embrace between mother and daughter with disapproval. ‘I told her you weren’t here,’ she explained reproachfully to Mimi. ‘But she came in anyway.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it,’ Regula grumbled, as insulted as someone whose cake has been a failure because of a deliberately incorrect recipe, and withdrew to the kitchen again, to continue analysing the presumed intentions of the tram driver.

Chanele must have come straight from the station; the smell of the locomotives still clung to her. She was not, however, as the rules of etiquette would have dictated, wearing a travelling suit, but her ‘uniform’ that she usually wore in the shop, and a hat that had not been en vogue at least since last season.

‘You haven’t even put on gloves!’ Mimi said reproachfully.

‘Nor you a dress.’

‘You have no idea how dreadful I feel.’

‘Have you come to pick me up?’ Hinda asked, and didn’t seem at all keen on the idea.

‘Let’s talk about that later. Now I have something to discuss with Mimi. Alone.’ Chanele said it in a tone that her daughter had never heard before: not actually severe, that would have been the wrong word, but such that it wouldn’t have occurred to one to contradict her.

Hinda curtsied obediently. ‘Then I’ll be in the kitchen.’

‘Tell Regula to clear away the breakfast things,’ Mimi called after her. ‘And that lunch…’ She put her hand to her brow and sighed. ‘Although I myself couldn’t eat a single… I can’t even think about it.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘Ach!’ said Mimi, and the dame de salon at the municipal theatre could not have outdone her bravely dismissive gesture. She was about to lead her guest into the dining-room — ‘Although everything is still standing around in there; I don’t know how I end up with such terrible staff!’ — but Chanele shook her head.

‘Let’s go into your room. It seems… how shall I put it? It seems more appropriate to me.’

There wasn’t even room for the two of them to sit down; the bed and both chairs were covered with clothes. Automatically, as she would have done in the shop, Chanele started clearing things away, while Mimi squatted on the Turkish pouffe by her dressing table and dabbed her temples with eau de cologne . For a while the only sound was the rustle of fabric and the click of hangers.

‘Mimi,’ Chanele said at last and studied the moiré effect on a yontev dress as intently as if she had never seen anything similar in all her time in the trade. ‘Mimi… Did it bother you very much that we never wanted to call you Miriam?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘There was a time when that was very important to you. Back then I never understood, but today… It would have been your real name, you had a right to it, and all of us — whether out of habit or cosiness — only ever called you Mimi.’

‘But I’m called Mimi.’

‘Of course, today.’ Chanele held the dress high to shake it out. It looked as if she were dancing with a life-sized doll, the gently rustling material a curtain between the two women. ‘But you never wondered whether you might have turned into a completely different person if you had had your own name?’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’ Mimi said it in the pitiful voice of a child that doesn’t want to go to school. ‘I have a headache.’

Chanele hung the dress in the cupboard and said, more into the black opening that smelled of old experiences than to Mimi: ‘I don’t understand it myself.’

She had already cleared a chair, and now she carried it over to the dressing table and sat down opposite Mimi, so close that their knees almost touched. Janki, long ago now, had once sat opposite Chanele like that. She had been afraid to look at him, but she had felt his breath. She had been almost naked at the time, so wonderfully naked. And then he had asked her…

What had she expected? If you have notions, it’s your own fault.

She took Mimi’s right hand, leaned over, breathed in the smell of bedroom and eau de cologne and suddenly kissed those strange fingertips.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mimi asked and drew her hand back.

‘I don’t know. It’s just… We aren’t sisters, you and I. We have never been friends, either. No, don’t contradict me. There was no friendship between us, not even when we were sleeping in the same bed. They stuffed us together the way I’ve just stuffed your dresses into the cupboard, velvet next to duchesse and black next to olive, as they happened to come. We didn’t choose each other. We got along, somehow, you with me and I with you. And when we laughed together — one also laughs with random acquaintances. But we told our secrets to others. You to your Anne-Kathrin and I to my pillow. It worked quite well, didn’t it, Mimi? It worked quite well.’

‘I don’t know what you want.’

Sometimes Mimi still had the same whining voice that she had had as a little girl, when she answered everything that sounded like criticism with a precautionary wail.

‘Everything was fine until Janki came. You remember? The bandage with the blood that wasn’t his? Of course you remember. We both did everything wrong, back then, me too. And so we never became friends. I regret that now. Because after all that time we belong together. Don’t you think so, Miriam?’

Mimi had never been able to hide her emotions. Even now Chanele could read everything happening in her on her face: surprise, the beginning of an argument, the beginning of a reconciliation and then a sly don’t-show-a-thing expression. As children they had often played ‘scissors, stone, paper’, and that was exactly what Mimi had looked like every time she had been determined not to be gulled. ‘Did you come to Zurich to tell me that?’ she asked.

‘No, that’s not why. And I don’t want you to give me an answer, either. That will grow eventually. I came because I need your help.’

‘What for?’

Chanele took two of the colourful bottles from the dressing table and tinkled them together like wine glasses. ‘You need to find a shidduch,’ she said.

Mimi was a bit disappointed that Chanele had anticipated her secret plan before she’d been able to put it into operation, so she argued against it. ‘Hinda has no interest whatsoever in that kind of thing.’

‘A shidduch for François.’

Mimi was so startled that her tongue hung out of her mouth.

‘Shmul?’

‘His name is François. Whether I like it or not.’

‘But he’s far too young to get married!’

‘Believe me,’ said Chanele, ‘he’s old enough.’

‘The boy is twenty-one.’

‘And he isn’t to get married straight away. But soon. As soon as possible.’

‘How could Janki come up with such a meshugena idea?’

‘Janki knows nothing about it.’

‘And you want…?’

‘If you help me.’

Mimi looked at Chanele in amazement, thought — scissors? stone? paper? — and then held her hand out. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.

It was good to talk about it. About François’s smile, in which the eyes didn’t smile too, that fake, polite smile with which he had always frightened Chanele, even when he was still a little boy, because even then his face had been like a book in a foreign language. How he had once, at five or six, persuaded another little boy, the godson of a cook, to put his hand on the red-hot oven door and how then, when the boy wept and screamed, he had said quite unmoved, ‘I just wanted to see if I could make him do it.’ How he had always brought good reports home from school, without really doing anything for them, because he always found someone to do his homework for him or let him copy it; how on Shabbos, when he was forbidden to do any kind of work, three or four of his fellow pupils would often be waiting for him outside the front door, practically beating each other up to be allowed to carry his schoolbag. One of his teachers had once, when he went with his wife to the Emporium and Chanele introduced herself to him, actually raved about what a gifted, yes, he had no qualms about putting it like that, what a blessed son she had, and François, when she mentioned it, had smiled his smile and said, ‘He’s a pushover; he has podagra, and on the days when he limps particularly badly, you just have to ask him how he is.’ Then, when he started helping in the shop, in the Drapery Store with Janki rather than with Chanele in the Emporium, he made a game of bringing the customer unsaleable pieces, goods from last year or with small flaws, and was pleased every time he talked someone into a sale and they were grateful to him. Chanele also described François’s very idiosyncratic way of speaking, which she called ‘poisoned’, because he was apparently able to say the most challenging things very politely, with a smile and a bow from the hip, and she told of how he felt superior to other people and despised those people for it.