Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘I’d like to fetch my father, I’d love to,’ said Pinchas and almost started stammering, ‘but he expressly ordered me to stay in the—’

‘Run!’

Sarah Pomeranz had come in, the woman whose cheesecake put Rothschild’s cook to shame. Even though she spent her life in the kitchen, she was just as gaunt as her husband and her son. It was almost part of her everyday outfit that her hands were covered with flour to the wrists, and she had to wipe them off on her apron before she was able to greet Golde properly. She closed the shop door behind Pinchas — ‘Who buys meat in the middle of the week?’ — and said in that way so characteristic of her: ‘You’ll have a coffee with me, no formalities, you give what you have.’ Golde, feeling slightly sick after all the excitement, was happy to accept the invitation, even though she knew that there was as much curiosity as hospitality involved. He who keeps secrets makes no friends.

While Sarah ran a handful of beans into the coffee mill and, to show how much she valued this visit, added another half-handful, Golde began to deliver her report. ‘He’s the same age as my son,’ she said, because sometimes, above all in events that violently stirred her emotions, she saw the child that hadn’t been allowed to live now standing before her as a grown-up man.

‘They say he’s a foreigner.’

‘A Frenchman, yes.’

‘And how did he come to you?’

‘He’s mishpocha of my husband.’

‘Ah, mishpocha,’ repeated Sarah, as if that explained everything, and explain everything it did. ‘And his name is?’

‘Janki. Janki Meijer.’

Sarah put the big dough bowl on the floor to make room on the table and straightened a table for Golde. ‘He wears a uniform, they say.’

‘He was a soldier.’

‘Wounded?’

‘No, nothing — Baruch Hashem! — happened to him.’

‘But he has a bandage. They say.’

‘He only has it… for security.’ There’s nothing, Golde noticed, that connects someone more closely with a person than a shared secret.

While her hostess turned the handle of the coffee mill, only with her fingertips as if that would make it quieter, Golde told her what she knew of Janki. As she did so she must have exaggerated slightly — when does one ever have the chance to tell such an adventurous tale? — because when the coffee was poured, a lot of coffee, not much water, as one does with honoured guests, Sarah sat down at her cup saying, ‘Just imagine… No older than my Pinchas, and already he’s survived Sedan!’ She made the sound of Jewish astonishment, a drawn-out hiss, the head moving back and forth so that the sound seems to ebb and flow.

‘He didn’t hear a single shot fired,’ Golde tried to correct her.

‘Not one? In such a big battle? Yes, God can protect a person wonderfully well.’ And because she always saw her husband’s shammes duties as her own, Sarah added, ‘He will be summoned to the Torah and bentch gomel.’

Golde didn’t contradict her any further. There are stories that are stronger than reality. And besides, she liked the idea that Janki, whom she already called her Janki in her mind, should be a hero and in the end: marching his feet bloody and sharing a kennel with a farm dog — is that any less heroic than fighting in a battle? She was already looking forward to the moment when he, healed once more, might stand on the almemor in the synagogue and bentch gomel. Who had more reason than he to speak as a thanksgiver for dangers survived? They would look down at him from the women’s shul, and the other women would say, ‘Without Golde’s beef broth, heaven forfend, he wouldn’t have survived.’

They drank their coffee, black and with lots of sugar, and Sarah flushed with pride when Golde told her how much the God-protected Janki had liked her cheesecake, how not a single piece of it had been left, indeed, he had pushed the crumbs together and licked them from the palm of his hand. ‘He’ll fit in well with us here in the village,’ Sarah said out of deep conviction, and Golde heard herself expressing, to her own surprise, something that she had not yet even really thought: ‘Yes, he will stay here. We will take him in. He has no one else, after all.’

Then Naftali Pomeranz came in and would have loved to hear all the news, but was sent to the shop to cut the meat. Sarah insisted — ‘That’s the least we can do!’ — that Golde didn’t take the little parcel home herself, but that Pinchas went with her. After all, doing something for a sick person was a God-pleasing deed, a mitzvah, and it would be a pleasure for her son, ‘isn’t that right, Pinchasle?’

Pinchas took such long strides that Golde almost had to scuttle her short legs to keep up with him. Out of pure politeness she tried to talk to the young man once or twice, and praised him for promising to be, as one heard, a worthy successor to his father, but couldn’t entice a sensible word from him. It was only when they were standing at the door of the double-fronted house and he handed her the parcel that he suddenly blurted, ‘Abraham Singer comes to see you often, doesn’t he?’ then turned and ran away without waiting for an answer.

‘Strange,’ thought Golde. ‘Why would he care whether the marriage broker had called on Mimi?’

While the beef broth was still cooking — perhaps the smell alone, drifting through the house, would have an effect — Janki fell asleep. His breath, although it still had a quiet, papery rustle, was so calm, and his forehead was so much cooler, that Chanele dried his feet, covered them up and crept from the room on tiptoe.

Janki was quite alone now. Uncle Melnitz sat on the empty chair by his bed and talked to him.

‘You’re asleep,’ said Melnitz. ‘You think nothing can happen to you when you’re here. But that’s not true. Here is no different from anywhere else. Nowhere is different.

‘Ten years ago was the last time it happened. Here in Endingen, yes. We were to get a few more rights. Not rights like the Christians, but almost like human beings. And they smashed in our windows. Not only the windows. Sometimes one of those stones lands on your head. Little Pnina had only herself to blame. She should have run away faster. Or made herself invisible. They would like us much better if we were invisible, yes.

‘There are no guilty parties, because no one was there. No one anyone knew. They’d discussed that. They’d also agreed that everything would happen unprepared. From the people. From the moment.’

Uncle Melnitz had closed his eyes like someone only repeating a lesson learned long ago to be sure that he hasn’t forgotten it.

‘And at the start of the century we had the plum war here in Endingen, that’s right. A little war. We live in a small country. The French had occupied Switzerland at the time. Napoleon. But they didn’t wage war against him. He wouldn’t have been afraid of their sticks. They fought against us. That’s simpler. They had taught us not to defend ourselves long ago.

‘They called it the plum war because the ripe plums were hanging from the trees. They like to wait until the harvest is over. Before, you have so much else to do. Afterwards you need something to do with your strength.

‘There was another name for it. The ribbon war. Because they stole the bright ribbons from the dealers they beat up. They took other things too, but you saw the ribbons afterwards. Fastened to jackets. To sleeves. To hats. As medals, that’s right. To show that they’d been there. Pride. Afterwards they always had only two possibilities. To be proud or be ashamed. They preferred to be proud.

‘Someone from the village, a head of the community — his name was Guggenheim, like the inn — tried to talk to them. That was a mistake. If you talk, you’re a human being, and they didn’t want us to be human beings. Because you don’t stick your pitchfork in a human being’s face, so that a prong goes in one cheek and out the other. Because you don’t laugh at a human being when he tries to talk and can’t because his tongue is torn. Because you don’t hit a human being on the back of the head with a threshing flail just to make them stop screaming.