Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘Plum war, that’s right. They called it war because the word made heroes of them. They’re always heroes, every time they lay into us.’

Janki had closed his eyes. The blanket over his chest rose and sank only slightly, a ship that had reached the harbour and still remembered the waves from a distance. One hand lay beside his head, palm upwards, as if he were waiting for a present.

‘You think you’re safe now,’ said Melnitz. ‘But there is no safety. When he was lying on the floor and had stopped moving, one of them put his boot on his head. One that the girls liked because even after a bottle of wine he didn’t touch them against their will. One who liked to play tunes on a comb with a sheet of paper folded over it. One who quickly picked dandelions for the rabbit whose neck he was going to break. A nice person.

‘He put his boot on his head and pressed his face in the dirt because he wouldn’t have been able to pull out the pitchfork otherwise. Tools are expensive, and the fork didn’t belong to him. If he had been alone, he would have apologised as he did it. He was a decent person, yes. But he wasn’t alone. They are never alone.

‘There is no safety,’ said Melnitz and told another story and another. He spoke without haste, someone who has a lot of time to fill. The way one speaks the Shemoneh Esrei at solemn festivals, one interpolation and then another. ‘Sometimes they shout,’ he said, ‘and sometimes they whisper. Sometimes they are silent for a long time, and you think they’ve forgotten us. But they don’t forget us. Believe me, Janki. They don’t forget us.’

The smell of beef broth now filled the whole house the way incense, they say, fills a church.

‘Horses?’

Salomon had been reluctant to take Janki along with him. First of all, people who have just been sick belong at home, and second… He hadn’t been able to say the second to Golde. His wife had taken this relative, this unexpected visitor, as unreservedly to her heart as, many years ago, Mimi had the kitten that a farm hand had wanted to drown and which, facing perils that grew with every repetition of the story, she had rescued from the Surb River. Then as now, arguments would have served no useful purpose, and Golde would certainly not have accepted the actual reason for his rejection: Salomon didn’t trust Janki. It was only a feeling, a grumbling in his belly, but Salomon had avoided many a bad deal because he had believed his belly more than his head.

So in the end he had given in, not because of Janki’s pleading eyes, even though they had seemed as big in that sunken face as the eyes of a pregnant cow, but just to have some peace. He had even lent him a coat, his own old coat, which he always wore when he knew he would be spending the whole day in byres, and had been annoyed — ‘Nu, it’s going to smell of violet water!’ — over the fact that Janki screwed up his nose and tested the heavy fabric as contemptuously between his fingers as a grain-dealer pulverising a dead ear of corn. He had lent him, no, given him, boots as well; why put off acts of generosity that you can’t avoid anyway? ‘It’s nice’, Golde had said, ‘that he’s so interested in your business. Who knows, perhaps it’s something for him later on?’ And Salomon, true to the principle that it’s usually a good idea to hold your tongue, hadn’t replied, ‘A tailor as a beheimes dealer? Is he going to measure up riding trousers for the cows?’

So now they walked along side by side. Salomon’s umbrella left its trail of holes, and Janki’s boots, always a few steps behind, tramped them closed again. It was the first warm day this year; the spring dripped freshly thawed from the trees, on which the birds practised twittering as eagerly as if their beaks had been frozen shut throughout all those months. There was not a trace of romanticism in Salomon Meijer, he didn’t even know the word, and yet today he would have preferred them to have walked in silence through the splashy morning.

But Janki talked. Still weakened by fever, he struggled to keep up, and talked. He stopped to catch his breath, ran a few steps behind, which left him even more short of breath, and talked. Salomon wasn’t walking any faster than usual, but he wasn’t walking more slowly either. He was on his way to meet master butcher Gubser in the byre that he had rented from the lea-farmer, and he would arrive on time for his appointment as he always did. Did Janki absolutely insist on coming? Nu, let him. If he wanted to waste his meagre strength chatting, instead of saving it for walking, then let him.

On the evening of his arrival, Janki had talked like a little boy coming home after his first day in cheder, and who has to get off his chest all the fears he endured from his strange new teacher. Now his breathless flow of chat had something of a quack doctor praising his home-made medicine in the marketplace, good against headaches, toothache and women’s complaints, promising guaranteed healing as long as the patient was willing to swallow the brew for three weeks, every day at the same time — probably aware that he himself would be standing far away in a different market in three weeks, and that all promises are forgotten in a year or even in only six months.

‘Horses? What would I want with horses? Cows are my trade.’

‘Yes,’ said Janki, ‘I understood that, but you have to try out new things too.’

‘Why?’

‘To get on. Monsieur Delormes was forever designing new cuts. Wide lapels. Narrow lapels. None at all.’

‘“None at all” is the one I like. Because cows don’t wear coats.’ He had had to keep his jokes to himself with Golde. But it wasn’t Salomon Meijer’s style to waste things.

‘It would be a good time for horses.’

‘Do you know that as a soldier or as a tailor?’

‘I know it from the man from Muri. The man I spent a long time talking French to.’

‘A horse trader?’

‘He was a teacher.’

‘At a school for horses?’

Salomon couldn’t afford to be ironic with his farmers. He found the argument all the more amusing now for that very reason. He even complacently swung his umbrella once around his hand, as smitten farmworkers did with their walking sticks on Sunday.

‘He told me something,’ said Janki. ‘It was secret, but he told me because he was proud that he knew all the words for it. Almost all the words, that is.’

‘Well?’

Janki, apparently interested only in the cleanliness of his new old boots, carefully stepped around a puddle. Anyone else wouldn’t even have noticed that he was only trying to hide his last hesitation before making a decision, but anyone who has engaged in lots of cattle deals learns to read such signs.

‘Well?’ Salomon asked again.

Janki coughed, although there was no coughing left in him. Then he stopped. ‘We can get involved in the business together.’

‘I should have walked on,’ Salomon said to himself later. ‘Just walked on and stopped listening to him. Then everything might have turned out differently.’

But he didn’t walk on. He stopped as well and asked, ‘What kind of business?’

‘Horses,’ said Janki, and now had a smile on his face that Salomon disliked as much as Mimi would have liked it. ‘We will sell horses that we don’t have.’

The business that Janki suggested when they stood facing one another among the dripping fruit trees, and which he over-eagerly explained as they walked along again, side by side, more slowly than before, which he praised with hucksterish eloquence, when they stopped again, gesticulating, having reached their destination far too quickly, this business went like this:

The French officers — ‘whose boots we had to clean, even though they barely ever set foot on the floor’ — all the lieutenants, capitaines and colonels, had not marched into their internment, but proudly ridden over the border, with freshly greased harnesses, had tugged the reins of their horses, which were fed significantly better than the infantrymen who dragged themselves wearily along, between the rows of Swiss soldiers, making them dance and traverse, in order to say: ‘We have not come here as defeated men, we still have strength in abundance, and if we’d wanted things to be different, we would have done things differently.’