Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

At last, and even that had — me neshumah! — not been easy to achieve, Rauhut declared himself willing to wait another few days with his article, but if by then he had no proof to the contrary, clear and unambiguous proof to the contrary… Verbatim, he said, ‘I will have no option,’ and anyone who speaks as pompously as that, Janki said, has evil on his mind. And generally speaking: how, excuse me, is one supposed to prove that something hasn’t happened?

Chanele heard all of this very calmly, so calmly that it made Janki really mad, and then said only a single sentence.

And Janki leapt to his feet and yelled for François.

His son came in smiling, and when Janki noisily slammed the door shut, his polite smile grew even wider, as when one tightens the rubber string of a carnival mask. Because Janki demanded as much, he sat down, but only with half his bottom, as though purely out of courtesy.

Janki set the walking stick with the lion’s-head handle down at an angle on the table in front of him, and rested both hands on it. ‘If you were a goy…’ he began, and had probably, while waiting for François, honed his rebukes to a very sharp point. But his rage was greater, and he started shouting in a voice that was constantly on the point of breaking. ‘But you aren’t a goy! You’re a Jew, and a Jew must behave respectably!’

‘So?’ said François, looking in his pocket for his case of Russian cigarettes.

‘You’re not going to smoke now, are you?’

A shrug. ‘If it bothers you, Papa…’

Chanele noticed without any great surprise that something had changed in her. Francois’ smile, which had frightened her so because of its strangeness, was no longer threatening since it had reminded her of something. The man in the insane asylum, the one with the tailcoat over his bare chest, had smiled just like that when he had said, ‘I’m incognito here.’

‘Why did you have to go and start something with the nafka?’ Janki yelled.

‘Louisli?’ François asked the question in an off-handed, throw-away manner as if to say, ‘What are you getting worked up about? It’s nothing more than a coffee stain on a tablecloth.’

‘Her too? This has got to stop! Is that clear? It will stop right now! No, I’m talking about this… about this… Chanele, what’s her name again?’

‘Marie-Theres Furrer.’

‘Oh, that one. You’d like her too.’ François nodded to his father as if to say, ‘If you wanted, we could have a nice little secret together.’

‘I don’t even know her!’ roared Janki. ‘And the whole town is saying I’ve got her pregnant. Don’t laugh! Stop laughing this instant! It’s going to be in the paper! And all just because you… because you…’

‘Is she pregnant?’

‘Yes,’ said Chanele.

‘Well, it’ll cost a bit of money. We’re not poor people.’

Janki brought his walking stick down so hard on the table that the handle came off. The lion’s head turned a number of somersaults and then came to a stop in front of François, sticking its tongue out in mockery.

‘We will become poor people!’ yelled Janki. ‘If people boycott us, we might as well shut up shop! You have no idea of the damage such an article can do. You are nothing and you know nothing and you haven’t experienced anything! The only thing you can do is unbutton your trousers and be an idiot!’

Janki’s rage, even though François was its butt, was directed much more at Herr Rauhut, against all the Rauhuts, against the whole town, against a world in which one could take as much trouble as one wanted, in which one could pedal frantically and do everything correctly and then all it took was a rumour, a single unmerited suspicion, to destroy everything one had built up over twenty years. François was not yet a real man, he could afford to make a mistake; at his age such things were practically expected of him. ‘Young blood’, people would have said, half in blame and half in admiration, women would have given him sidelong looks and dreamed up stories in which they themselves played the lead role, men would have been a bit envious and then, if word had got out that they had treated the girl decently, with an appropriate sum, the matter would have disappeared, once and for all, forgiven and forgotten. But now people thought he had been messing around with the girl, a girl twenty-five years younger than he was himself, and an employee to boot, which made it doubly contemptible. Above all it would now become public, not just something one talked about over brandy and cigars after the ladies had withdrawn. Now it would have consequences. Janki was not François. He was no longer a young rake, he belonged to society, or he nearly did, he would have belonged to it long since if he only went to church on Sunday and not to the prayer room on Shabbos, and in society the rules were stricter. His customers, those arrogant small-town queens whom he had been courting for two decades, would stay away, and if they didn’t stay away they would turn up their peasant noses, they would look at him like… like… like a salesman, a quite ordinary tailor, someone who has to be subservient, whom one uses when one needs him, but that’s all. Now he would never belong to it.

That was why Janki shouted so loudly.

Then when Hinda came in and wanted to know what was going on, he was already quite out of breath, he had cursed François a thousand times and forbidden him a thousand things — he was not allowed to go out of the house except to work, they would soon see who was in charge around here — but he had not solved the actual problem: how does one make a rumour disappear?

‘Don’t worry, Hinda, my ray of sunshine,’ he tried to lie. ‘We are only discussing a business matter. An unpleasant matter, but nothing for you to worry about. How were things in Zurich?’

But Janki’s veins were swollen, and he was as red in the face as Councillor Bugmann. François had fixed his eyes on a point where there was nothing to see, and the smile was frozen on his face. Chanele sat straight-backed on her chair and seemed to be waiting for something.

‘I would prefer to tell you about Zurich later,’ Hinda said quickly. ‘For now I want to check that we’re having dinner this evening.’

When she had left, Janki picked up the broken lion’s head and tried hopelessly to fix it back to the stick. ‘Do you think I can glue it back on?’ he asked in a sad voice.

‘If you let me do it,’ said Chanele, ‘I’ll sort everything out.’

‘Three thousand francs?’

Herr Ziltener’s hands were clenched behind his back in an attempt to ensure that he didn’t touch Chanele’s desk even by accident. Her office was so small that any conversation carried out behind closed doors assumed an inadvertently intimate character, a kind of familiarity with which this sober accountant was extremely uncomfortable.

‘Three thousand francs? The boss said nothing to me about that.’

‘Because he doesn’t know anything about it.’

‘In that case I can’t…’

‘Yes, you can, Herr Ziltener,’ said Chanele, and realised to her own surprise how much she had been looking forward to this moment. ‘You have authority to deal in sums up to this figure.’

‘But…’

‘My husband granted you that authority on the assumption that you are capable of conducting transactions of this magnitude without having to request his instructions.’

‘Three thousand francs… not a small matter.’ Herr Ziltener wasn’t stammering, but he wasn’t far off.

‘If you feel it’s too much for you,’ Chanele went on, a little ashamed that she was enjoying the situation so much, ‘my husband and I will fully understand if you prefer to leave our company and seek a less demanding post elsewhere.’