Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

For once Mimi was a good listener. She nodded or tilted her head back and forth in a amazement, said, ‘ Vraiment? ’ or ‘ Mon Dieu! ’ and didn’t let go of Chanele’s hand all the while.

But then when Chanele got to the evening of the goyish dinner, when she told of how Mathilde Lutz had knocked at her office door and told her that a young salesgirl was pregnant, and by whom, in her excitement Mimi forgot to speak French, exclaimed, ‘me neshuma!’ and ‘Shema beni!’ and patted Chanele’s hand as one does on a sickbed visit, when one wants to give the patient more hope than one actually feels.

In forty years the two women had never been so close.

‘What are you going to do about the girl? Mimi asked at last. ‘Such a thing could be a scandal, particularly in a small town like your Baden.’

‘I know,’ said Chanele, and didn’t seem to be particularly worried about a scandal. ‘But I’ve already got something under way.’

‘Sometimes,’ thought Mimi, ‘sometimes Chanele has a smile not that unlike her son’s. Except that she would be horrified if she knew.’ She felt a sudden urge to take Chanele in her arms and press her very, very firmly to her. But of course she didn’t, she just asked, ‘And Shmul…?’

‘His name is François.’

‘Do you think he loves her?’

Chanele shook his head. ‘He just wanted to see if he could make her do it.’

‘And now you want to marry him soon?’

‘I think it will be the best thing. Because it will rein him in. It’s not a good solution, but it’s still the best one.’

Mimi stroked her friend’s fingers. Her friend? So be it: her friend. Those hands that had worked for so long in Golde’s kitchen had become no less rough during the years when Chanele had been Madame Meijer.

‘I’ve got a secret to tell you,’ Mimi said, and her sudden courage turned her cheeks quite red. ‘The loveliest thing for me, the loveliest thing ever, would have been to have children of my own. But if I can’t have any, if it simply isn’t to be, then the second loveliest would be to make a shidduch for others. I sometimes think: I’m God’s experiment to see if one can make a mother-in-law from scratch.’ She laughed as she said it, but she meant it in all seriousness.

On the dressing table, among all the fashionable fripperies, there was a diary. Its pages were still quite empty, even though it was for the year 1887. Mimi hadn’t bought it then because she needed it, but because it was bound in such beautiful Morocco leather, exactly the same leather as the money bag that Janki had used so many years ago to open his own shop… Anyway. It had a little silver pencil which she now picked up, flipped the diary open and said like a waiter taking an order: ‘So, Madame Meijer! I’m listening!’ She looked girlishly dainty, sitting there with her head tilted expectantly to one side, and the sight made Chanele feel slightly sad in a not disagreeable way, like entries in an old poetry album.

‘What’s it to be?’ asked Mimi, and moistened the tip of the pencil with her tongue, as she had once seen the clerk do at the post office counter. ‘Young? Pretty? Rich?’

Chanele didn’t respond to the facetious tone and answered the questions very seriously. ‘Rich will be necessary. Yes, I think so. At least well-to-do. Otherwise Janki won’t agree with me. Young? That’s not so important. As far as I’m concerned she can be older than François. He isn’t supposed to fall in love with her, he’s just supposed to marry her.’

Mimi couldn’t believe her ears. For her, having grown up with novels, Chanele had just said something monstrous. ‘Not fall in love?’

‘I don’t think François can. That’s why it wouldn’t be good if the girl was pretty.’

‘You’re joking now.’

‘I’m just trying to see things as they are.’

‘And you see your son with an ugly old bag?’

‘I see François. As he is. And I know: if he’s married, he will cheat on his wife.’

‘Chanele!’ In a play, Mimi had heard an actor say something similarly dreadful. But not in such a calm, natural voice.

‘There’s no point pretending,’ Chanele said. ‘If you don’t accept reality, eventually you go mad. Believe me, I know that. François will always want to have everything, especially the things he’s not supposed to. And he will get them. That will make him a good businessman and a bad husband.’

‘So…’

‘I’ve thought about it very hard. A pretty young woman who’s always been accustomed to compliments, whose suitors have always been queuing up outside the front door — she would be destroyed by a man like François. First she would blame him, then herself, and then she would be unhappy for the rest of her life.’

‘You’re meshuga!’

‘You think?’ Chanele took the diary out of Mimi’s hand and set it back down in its place. Only then did she go on talking, so quietly and tonelessly that Mimi had to lean forward to understand her. ‘If Janki had married you then — could you bear being treated as he treats me?’

‘Does he treat you badly?’

‘No,’ said Chanele. ‘Does one treat one’s desk badly? One’s cigarette case? He isn’t interested enough in me to treat me badly. It’s enough for him that I’m there and do the things that need to be done.’

‘I’m sure that’s partly…’ — ‘your fault,’ Mimi had wanted to say, but the Chanele who was siting opposite her was no longer the same Chanele she had known all her life. And she herself, it seemed to her in her bedroom right now, was no longer the same Mimi. ‘I’m sure it’s down to work,’ she said for that reason. ‘A man like that has a thousand things on his mind.’

‘Of course,’ said Chanele and didn’t mean it. ‘But what matters is this: I’ve never expected much from my life, so I can cope with the fact that I haven’t had much. While you…’

‘While I have no children. I’ll soon be an old woman, and I become more and more superfluous with every year.’

‘You aren’t superfluous,’ said Chanele. ‘I, for example, need you a lot.’

Mimi rubbed her temples and then her eyes as well. She still had headaches, but that had nothing to do with it.

Mimi was needed, so she forgot all her complaints.

Admittedly Chanele’s plan was meshuga, she thought, and if she, Mimi, had ever come up with such an idea, people would have said she was wool-gathering again, but sometimes she had the feeling that we live in a meshugena world, and being crazy was perhaps the only reasonable option. Chanele had been very right to come to her straight away with her wish, not just because they were friends — ‘That’s what we are now, aren’t we, Chanele?’ — but above all because here in Zurich she knew every Jewish family, really every single one, that was the advantage, but also the curse, if you owned the only kosher butcher’s shop in the city. She could list every marriageable girl in the community, she could write a list if necessary, right now on the spot in the diary with the red binding. And she could introduce her to the families at any time, very discreetly and as if by chance. It was only a shame that Chanele hadn’t come up with her plan a few days earlier because today, today of all days, as a day for such introductions would have been a good one, surprisingly good, in fact, she herself believed in such hints from fate, and at some point, in a quiet minute, she would have to confide something in Chanele — one couldn’t talk to Pinchas about such matters — about one Madame Rosa and certain messages that one received at her house, but now was not the moment. She sometimes got lost in her thoughts like a child in a room full of enticing toys. Chanele had to ask her twice what was so special about this day, and she didn’t immediately understand Mimi’s answer. The clothes collection of the Hachnasat Kallah Association, she explained, clinging to the bedpost so that Chanele could tighten the laces of her corset — ‘Much tighter, I can take it!’ — this clothes collection to which she, Mimi, had to go anyway, in fact she was already far too late, would have been the ideal opportunity to take an initial look, one could meet most of the women with eligible daughters, and shidduchim, whatever men thought, were always made by the mothers. When she talked about it, Mimi was entirely in her element, and the rustic red patches on her cheek became so pronounced that she had to hide them with foundation cream; one didn’t want to look like a milkmaid, after all.