Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘For ever?’ Salomon thought.

‘For ever,’ thought Mimi.

Next morning Janki had a high fever.

His cold, only temporarily concealed by the excitements of the previous evening, had returned invigorated, if it was indeed only a cold and not, heaven forfend, bronchitis or worse. Salomon had set off for Degermoos early in the morning, without seeing his guest again, and so it was left to the three women to tend to the patient.

They had set up a bed for him in the attic room, and there he lay now, his whole body boiling hot and still shivering with cold. His vacant eyes were open wide, but if you moved your hand in front of them, the pupils didn’t follow the movement. Every now and again a dry cough shook Janki’s body, as if an unknown person were hammering his chest from within. His lips trembled, like a premature baby that wanted to cry but didn’t yet have the strength, or an old man who had already used up all the tears that life had assigned him.

The room was dark and sticky. Up here, where only a shnorrer would ever have spent the night, there was no real window, just a hatch that could be opened a crack to let in a little light and air. But outside it was icy cold and frozen, one of those jangling late winter days when every breath cuts your throat, and Golde said Janki had — me neshuma! — had enough. So the hatch remained closed, and lest the patient be left entirely in the dark, they had had to light some flickering candles that almost went out every time someone’s skirt stirred in the cramped room. Practical Chanele suggested putting the candles in jars, but Mimi emphatically resisted the idea, and when Chanele asked for a sensible reason, Mimi wiped tears from her eyes and refused to answer. The inexpressible reason, and Golde felt this exactly as her daughter did, was of course that such candles would have looked like the commemorative ones set up on the day of a relative’s death.

Among the candles on the old bedside table — one leg was missing, and they had had to put a plank of wood underneath it — framed by the flickering wicks, lay Janki’s yellow neckerchief, in which Golde had tied his coins, all the kings, emperors and revolutionary spirits. She avoided looking there, because when she held the heavy lump in her hand, a thought of which she was still ashamed had passed through her mind. ‘Enough for a levaya,’ she had thought, ‘enough money for a funeral.’

Trying to do something good for Janki, the three women jostled one another by his bed, elbow to elbow. With a damp cloth Chanele dabbed away the white crust that kept forming on his lips, like a baby bringing up sour milk. Golde tried to pour a slip of lukewarm tea between his lips, but it just ran down his chin to the collar of his shirt. The trail of fluid shimmered for a moment on his hot skin, and had then vanished again. Mimi had fetched a comb, her own comb, and cleared the hair from his damp forehead for the third time.

Then Janki suddenly began to speak.

It was more of a murmur, turned inwards, not outwards, he was saying something to himself to remind himself or to forget. They couldn’t make out the words, even though they were always the same few syllables, over and over and over.

‘He’s praying,’ said Golde, and forbade herself from thinking what prayer a man who was seriously ill might utter.

‘Perhaps he’s hungry,’ said Chanele.

‘Sha!’ said Mimi, and bent so low over the sick man that his smell, unsettlingly clean and slightly sour like bread dough, enveloped her as if she were caught in its embrace. Her ear was close to his mouth, but she didn’t feel his breath, just sensed the words, which were French but incomprehensible, and which made her pointlessly jealous, an alien conversation in which she was not involved. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said more loudly than necessary. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He is ill, and he needs peace and quiet, and, generally speaking, us treading on each other’s feet here won’t help him.’ And with those words she ran from the room, they heard her footsteps on the stairs, and the other two women, who had known Mimi for a lifetime, took a look to agree that she would now shut herself away in her room and there would be no sign of her for the next few hours.

‘Then I’ll go to Pomeranz,’ said Golde after a brief silence. Where Techías Hameisim tea did not help, she liked to deploy her most powerful weapon in the battle against illnesses of all kinds: a beef broth cooked so fiercely that a whole pound of meat produced only a single cup. Usually she would have sent Chanele to shochet Pomeranz to fetch the piece of stripped flank, but the short walk through the cold air would do her good, she thought, it would clear her head, foggy from the stuffy air. ‘You take care of things in the meantime,’ she said to Chanele, and was already outside the door.

Freed equally from Golde’s clucky concern and from Mimi’s impractical over-eagerness, Chanele first of all opened the hatch in the roof — even with a fever, she said to herself, you can’t freeze under a thick eiderdown — blew the candles out, then sat down by the bed with a bowl of vinegar water and methodically changed the cold compresses that were supposed to draw the fever to the feet and from there out of the body. Once, struggling with the stranger in his chest, Janki rolled over so violently that he threw the eiderdown to the floor. The skin on his legs was paler than that of his face, and his penis was long and thin.

The French words that he repeated so often, without being able to remember them later, were two lines from a song: about a drummer drumming the march and the ravens sitting in the trees and waiting.

In a village the night has many eyes and even more ears. Their night-time visit was already bound to have travelled around the community, and Golde knew that everyone she met would ask questions, some of them spoken out loud, but most, even more pressing, silent. So she didn’t go straight to the Marktgasse, but took a detour via the Mühleweg, along the Surb and past the mikvah, the bathing house, where she was unlikely to meet an acquaintance at this time of day. The little meadow where the river gently bends and where you can rub your washing clean so well would be deserted in the icy cold.

She walked quickly, on her short, always slightly waddling steps, a duck that’s being driven on with sticks but still can’t quite bring itself to fly. The wind swept particles of ice from the trees; they struck Golde’s face like fine needles, and she enjoyed the stinging pain because it ennobled the purchase of a pound of meat for soup into a mission full of self-sacrifice. Where the alleyways narrowed again and the houses with their curious windows waited for her, she pulled the black headscarf tighter around her head, and actually managed to reach Naftali Pomeranz’s shop without a single person talking to her.

Naftali wasn’t there. Only Pinchas, his son, of whom Pomeranz was so proud, looked after the shop, a lanky lad, as long and thin as his father, with a thin growth of beard and a big gap in his teeth in which, when he was embarrassed, his tongue played. He was standing at the window with a rag in one hand and a book in the other, had probably started cleaning it and then immersed himself once more in his reading. When Golde addressed him, he started wildly, dropped his book, just managed to catch it, had to bend down for the rag and said at last that his father had gone to shul, to the synagogue, to prepare the Torah scrolls for the Pesach service, and could she come back later, he wouldn’t be long.

‘No wonder he’s still single at twenty-five,’ thought Golde. No, she said severely, she couldn’t come back later, she had a sick guest at home who needed his strengthening soup, and as quickly as possible.