Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

In spite of all the excitement he had experienced, and the fresh excitement that was happening right now, that was the moment that Arthur would later remember most clearly, ‘the precise moment’, he was still saying fifty years later, ‘when I stopped simply being a child. I realised for the first time, at that exact second, that all the people I knew weren’t there just because of me, but that they had a life of their own, a life I knew nothing about, and which had absolutely nothing to do with me.’

‘I know men,’ said Christine. ‘They’re all the same.’

‘He knocked at the door, did young Herr François, I pretended to be asleep, but he just didn’t stop. I put my head under the pillow, but that doesn’t help.’ Louisli said all that in a very small, tearful voice, but Arthur with his fine ear still had the impression that she was enjoying the story, just like the martyr on the panel outside the Panopticon had been happy with his wounds, ‘I only let him in so that he didn’t wake everyone up,’ she even smiled.

‘I was awake.’ Christine, like Louisli, had her bedroom in the attic.

‘He said he loved me. That he couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking about me. That I was the only one in his life.’

‘Ha,’ said Christine, who would never have fallen for such a move.

‘And then… and then…’ Louisli started crying again, but this time the lion was gone.

‘Nothing happened,’ said Christine, and although Arthur couldn’t imagine what had gone on between Shmul and Louisli, it was clear to him that that was a lie. Something had happened.

‘Have you bled this month?’ Christine asked. And when Lousli nodded through her tears, ‘Then everything’s all right.’

Arthur, quite confused now, thought once more of the martyr with all his wounds.

Christine had been speaking comfortingly and attentively to Louisli, but now her tone suddenly changed, just as one doesn’t go on stirring a sauce once it has started to set, and she said quite soberly, ‘So tell me! What’s going on over there?’

There’s nothing one can do if one has simply been forgotten and then hears things not meant for one’s ears. Christine herself had brought him into the kitchen, and no one had told him that the conversation between the two women was none of his business. If he had cleared his throat or otherwise drawn attention to himself, he could only have disturbed them at a moment when they certainly didn’t want to be disturbed. So Arthur just stayed in his corner and listened.

Papa, he learned, had come home in a rage, more furious than anyone could remember, had shouted for Chanele and later for François, and had then locked himself in with them both in the dining room, had slammed the door so violently that a picture fell off the wall in the corridor, the painting of the bearded man in the funny shack. ‘It’s a sukkah,’ Arthur thought, ‘a rabbi in a sukkah,’ and nearly said it out loud. This painting — Christine now leaned it carefully against a chair — that couldn’t just have been left lying on the floor, would have been an excuse for Louisli if someone had caught her listening at the door. Christine, the first to go out and check what was going on, had actually heard Janki yelling something about fornication, about shame being brought down on his house, and when she said that in the kitchen Louisli had turned quite pale. She had then crept out herself, even though her legs were trembling with excitement, and at first she hadn’t understood anything, not just because Janki’s voice kept breaking with fury, but because he had lapsed into a language that she didn’t know, it sounded like ordinary German, and then again it didn’t, and it was only the answers that François had given that made her understand that they weren’t talking about her. She had been so worried about being sent home under a cloud of shame and insults, that her people would never, never have forgiven her, and she would have been seen as the village slut for ever and ever, but then, when she realised that they weren’t even talking about her, it had actually been much worse, to know that François had another and perhaps many more, a salesgirl in the Emporium who was even expecting his child.

It was, even before his bar mitzvah, really the day when Arthur grew up.

Louisli stood for a long time at the dining room door, still holding the painting, but she couldn’t hear much more. Then she had had to run away because she had heard footsteps, probably Hinda. Her room was right at the end of the corridor, but such a racket must have been audible all the way there. And there wouldn’t have been any point listening any longer, because what she heard went around in a circle, so to speak, always the same: Janki swore and threatened, François made excuses, didn’t understand why everyone was so worked up, and Chanele only spoke occasionally, always very calmly and in very few words. And then Janki started shouting again.

Christine, who knew men, was a little surprised, because in her estimation of Janki, she said, she would never have thought that he could get so worked up about such a matter.

Louisli sniffed into her sleeve and said it wasn’t just such a matter, it had broken her heart at any rate, and she would never get over it her whole life long.

Christine said, ‘Ha!’ and smiled her boxer’s laugh.

But in the kitchen they didn’t know everything, and even Janki and François, the ones most affected, knew only a part.

In fact what had happened was the following:

In the afternoon, just as Janki was serving two particularly good customers, Frau Wiederkehr — ‘of the rich Wiederkehrs’ — and Frau Strähle, the wife of the manager of the Verenahof, Herr Rauhut the editor came into the shop, never having been in it before, and demanded to talk to Janki, right away, he would not be put off. ‘In private, please: I’m sure you don’t want everyone to know what I have to discuss with you.’ Janki explained to him that he really had no time right now, he said it quite politely, and even made a little joke, to the effect that the customer was queen as far he was concerned, and anyone who didn’t want to fall out of favour would be well advised not to leave his monarch rudely in the lurch, but Rauhut insisted, he even became impertinent — ‘When he is sober, which isn’t often, the chap’s even more unbearable!’ — and said at last that he didn’t care himself, as far as he was concerned they could go on talking in public, because sooner or later it would appear in the Tagblatt anyway. And then he asked, in front of Frau Wiederkehr and Frau Strähle — who of course would tell her husband, and then one might as well put it in the paper without further ado — just asked straight out: ‘Is it true, Herr Meijer, that the salesgirl Marie-Theres Furrer of the Modern Emporium is expecting your child?’

Janki had never heard the name — ‘You are aware that I don’t know all the women who work in my shops!’ — but Rauhut refused to believe him, he had it from a good source, a very good source, that there had been some hanky-panky, if he might use the term. And he had been told that the girl was pregnant, one could in fact see it with the naked eye. He as an editor was at the service of the public, and the public had a right to be informed and warned regardless of the status of the person if things happened in town which were irreconcilable with public morals.

Janki contradicted, denied, even pleaded. He remembered only too well the newspaper article that had almost ruined him on the day of the Drapery opening. But Rauhut stood his ground and referred repeatedly to his source, whom he could not name, but who was reliable, absolutely reliable. And all that in front of the greedy ears of Frau Wiederkehr and Frau Strähle, who clearly couldn’t wait to pass on the story and spread it around, not as an unproven accusation, of course, but as a documented fact.