Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Herr Kamionker smiled, quite peacefully, as he had once smiled quite peacefully at Simon Heller of the tallis-weaving mill in Heller’s office, and said Herr Meijer must not have heard him correctly, he had said quite clearly that this point was non-negotiable.

Janki raised his stick and was about to bring it down on the table, but lowered it again straight away, not out of fear, of course, after all, he’d been in the war, but he’d just had the lion’s-head handle glued back on, and if it happened again, they had warned him in the turner’s workshop, that fine piece of craftsmanship might no longer be reparable.

At that François leapt to his feet, the tips of his moustache on end, and grabbed Kamionker by the collar, grabbed the thick material of his jacket with his fist and was about to throw out this unruly guest, but Kamionker just sat there as if no one were tugging away at him, and it was only when François grabbed him with his other hand as well and tried to pull him up as a clumsy person might try to lift a heavy piece of luggage, that Kamionker flicked him away, there could be no better word for it, he just flicked him away, wearing an expression as if it were just a piece of high-spirited banter among friends.

That was exactly how he had smiled, with big white teeth, in the Palm Garden, when he had tripped over Hinda and landed right in her lap.

‘The police!’ François gasped breathlessly. ‘We need to call the police.’

‘Police? Narrishkeit!’ said Zalman Kamionker. That was another word that people in Switzerland didn’t know and yet understood. He picked a crystal carafe off the table and weighed it in his hand as if checking its suitability as a missile. François took shelter behind his chair.

Arthur noticed with some pride and a little disbelief that he wasn’t scared at all, even though he would have had every reason to be.

Kamionker looked at the carafe thoughtfully and set it back down on the table-cloth. ‘You are rich people,’ he said Janki. ‘All right then. It’s not something I’ve chosen myself, but there’s nothing I can do about it. So if it’s about the dowry — we don’t need one. I’ve always made everything in my life with my own hands.’

‘It’s not about the dowry!’ said Janki in too loud a voice, and propped a hand on his hip as Monsieur Delormes had always done.

‘As you wish. I’ve said before: on all these points I am happy to abide by your wishes.’

It was the second time in only two days that Janki began to shout. Louisli would have had more to eavesdrop on today than yesterday, but she was too busy pouring her heart out to the fat cook. You can pour out a full heart for as long as you like, it doesn’t get any emptier.

And neither did Janki’s fury subside just because he gave it such noisy expression. On the contrary: it just went on growing until he could only make little yapping noises, as when one runs out of breath on an over-inflated stomach. Except that in this instance there was no sodium bicarbonate powder to grant him relief.

Eventually he fell completely silent. The eruption was over. Zalman Kamionker had waited quite calmly, a specialist in pyrotechnics who knows exactly when a Roman candle has burnt itself out. Then he turned to Chanele. ‘And what do you think, Frau Meijer?’

Chanele looked at him for a long time, from the greasy leather cap to the peasant shoes, from the unkempt hair to the fingernails with the black edges. She raised her eyebrows so that the black line seemed to occupy the middle of her forehead, and then asked the question that Arthur would have asked long ago if he had not been a little boy but an adult just like the others. ‘Have you talked to Hinda about it?’

Hinda was still holding her soup spoon, and now set it down as carefully as one might set a lucky ladybird that had landed on one’s hand from a leaf.

‘Nu?’ asked Chanele, when Kamionker didn’t reply.

Zalman was embarrassed as only someone can be for whom embarrassment is an entirely unfamiliar feeling.

‘So it’s like this,’ he said and hesitated. ‘I thought I had to ask the parents first.’

‘Narrishkeit,’ said Chanele, already knowing that this would become one of her favourite words.

‘I wanted…’ said Kamionker.

‘Ask her!’

Meanwhile Janki had recovered the use of speech. ‘It’s absolutely out of the…’ he began.

‘Scha!’ said Chanele.

Zalman Kamionker, who had been so confident until this point, now studied his hands, like an instrument that he had never learned to play. Then he held them out to Hinda, as shyly as a little child handing a bouquet to a queen. ‘Fräulein Hinda,’ he asked, ‘will you…?’

Hinda kept him waiting, and only after a few endless seconds she said, ‘What am I supposed to do? If it’s non-negotiable…’

It was June already, and Mimi still wasn’t feeling any better. She was so bloated that she couldn’t bring herself to look in the mirror, although — ‘ Comme ça me dégoûte! ’ — she couldn’t keep anything down. Pinchas sometimes heard her retching when he got up very early in the morning to lay tefillin.

Sophie, the successor to the unfortunate Regula, was something of an expert in herbs, and treated Mimi with teas whose exact recipes, as she proudly explained, were in her family only ever passed on to the oldest daughter, to some extent as a dowry. She herself, she said with a significant expression, would probably pass on the secret knowledge to her niece, because Sophie didn’t like men. Pinchas often hadn’t even heard the names of the plants and roots that she boiled up in his kitchen, and who passed on their penetrating smell to his food. Mimi at first swore by Sophie’s arts, and a tea from a garden weed called cinquefoil — Sophie called it crampwort — even brought her a certain relief. But then, after a visit to her home village, Sophie made a brew of buckthorn bar that gave Mimi diarrhoea for several days. That was the end of the herbal cures, and a new maid called Gesine Hunziker was taken on.

Mimi was also — although Pinchas wasn’t allowed to know anything about it — again attending séances at Madame Rosa’s. But the voices from beyond could give her no advice, quite the contrary. The only message she received was, ‘There is much youth in you,’ and Mimi perceived this as transcendental mockery, because she was secretly convinced that her problems had to do with a feared time in the life of a woman, which Golde had prudishly referred to as ‘the change’. Mimi was far too young for that, in fact, but she had always been particularly troubled by such things, other people had no idea how.

For weeks Pinchas had wanted to seek advice from Dr Wertheim, but Mimi categorically refused; she didn’t like dealing with doctors. At the time when she lost her chid, no one had been able to help her, and spending a pile of money just so that someone can explain in Latin that he hasn’t a clue? Certainement pas!

‘I’m not sick,’ she said, ‘I just don’t feel good, and it wouldn’t be half as bad if you didn’t make such a fuss about it.’

That Sunday, when Pinchas had to go to Endingen early for a debate, her feeling of nausea wouldn’t subside. In fact Mimi had wanted to go with him; she hadn’t seen her childhood friend Anne-Kathrin for ages, and it would have been a good opportunity. Anne-Kathrin still lived in Endingen, but hadn’t lived in the school house for a long time. She had married the eldest son of master butcher Gubser, and had since then written Mimi regular letters, in which, in her tiny handwriting, she had told her of all the amazing progress that her four unusually gifted children were making week by week. The terrifying perfection of these offspring had been reason enough for the childless Mimi to put the trip off time and again, and secretly she was quite glad to have the state of her health as an excuse to herself. More than an excuse, God knows, because the very thought of the smoke from the locomotive filled her mouth with such a bitter taste that in the end she gave in and promised to call the doctor, ‘yes, definitely today’. Dr Wertheim was part of the community, he shouldn’t have been sent for on Shabbos, but on a Sunday that wasn’t a problem. And now if Pinchas would be so kind as to set off on his trip, Mimi said, and not miss his train on her account, because his excessive concern would eventually turn her into a truly sick woman.