Melnitz

By Charles Lewinsky

The international-bestselling saga of a large and colorful Jewish family buffeted from quiet respectability-of-sorts in 1871 to the Nazi death camps of 1945. 1871: cattle-dealer Solomon Meijer has made a reputation for himself as one of the few honest Jews in Endingen, a rare Swiss town in which Jews are allowed to reside. He leads a largely untroubled life, rewarded by his work and comforted at home by his wife and two daughters. But all of this is set to end when he answers a knock at the door in the middle of the night. On the doorstep stands his young distant cousin, Janki, half-dead and begging for refuge. The pitiful figure is invited in and given a coveted place in the bosom of the family, but when Janki recovers and regains his ambition and his fine-looks, he will change the Meijer family's lives for generations to come. . . In the tradition of the great family romances of the 19th century, Melnitz is the saga of the Swiss-Jewish Meijer family, spanning five generations from the Franco-Prussian War to World War II. It is a novel of fate, fortune, and great falls; a homage to the sunken world of Yiddish culture and a celebration of the enduring spirit of biting Jewish humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781782394051

Book preview

1871

1

Every time he died, he came back.

On the last day of the week of mourning, when the loss had dispersed into the everyday, when you had to make a special effort to seek out the pain, a gnat-bite which stung yesterday and which you hardly feel today, his back aching from sitting on the low stools assigned by ancient custom to the bereaved for those seven days, there he was again as if it were the most natural thing in the world, walking inconspicuously into the room with the other visitors, indistinguishable from them in outward appearance. But he brought no food with him, even though that would have been the custom. In the kitchen the pots and covered bowls waited in line, a guard of honour for the deceased; he came empty-handed, took a chair, as one does, said not a word unless addressed by the other mourners, stood up when they prayed, sat down when they sat down. And when the others, murmuring their words of condolence, took their leave, he simply stayed on his chair, he was there again, as he had always been there. His smell of damp dust mingled with the other smells of the house of mourning, sweat, tallow candles, impatience; he was part of it again, he joined in the grieving, took leave of himself, sighed his familiar sigh, which was half a groan and half a snore, fell asleep with his head drooping and his mouth open, and was there again.

Salomon Meijer rose from his stool, lifted his body up like a heavy weight, like a quarter of a cow or a mill-sack of flour, stretched so that the joints in his shoulders cracked, and said, ‘So. Let us have something to eat.’ He was a tall, broad man, and the only reason he didn’t create an impression of strength was that his head was too small for his bulk, the head of a scholar on a peasant’s body. He had grown side-whiskers which were in places – far too early, Salomon thought – already turning white. Beneath them, framed by his beard, a network of little burst veins formed two red patches that always made him look tipsy, even though he only drank wine for the festive kiddush, and otherwise one or two beers at most on very hot days. Anything else befogs the head, and the head is the most important part of a cattle dealer’s body.

He dressed entirely in black, not out of mourning, but because he couldn’t imagine wearing another colour; he wore an old-fashioned frock coat of heavy cloth which, since no more visitors were expected, he now unbuttoned and dropped to the floor behind him without looking round. He assumed that his Golde would pick up the frock coat and lay it over the arm of a chair, and there was nothing tyrannical about it, only the naturalness of spheres clearly assigned. He straightened his silk cap, a superfluous gesture, since it had not slipped for years, for no unruly hair grew on Salomon Meijer’s head. Even as a young man his friends had called him Galekh, the monk, because the bald patch on his head reminded them of a tonsure.

On his way to the kitchen he rubbed his hands, as he always did when food was in store; as if he were already washing his hands, even before he had reached any water.

Golde, Frau Salomon Meijer, had to lift her arms over her head to shake out the frock coat. She was short, and had once been delicate, so delicate that in the first year of their marriage a jocular habit had come about, one which no outsider understood or even so much as noticed. When, at the beginning of the Sabbath, Salomon uttered the biblical verse ‘Eyshes chayil, mi yimtza’ in praise of the housewife, he paused after the first words and peered questingly around, as if he had said not ‘Who can find a virtuous woman’ but ‘Who can find the virtuous woman?’. Long ago, having married young and fallen in love young too, every Friday he had accompanied the words with a pantomime, looking with exaggerated foolishness for his fine little wife, and had then, having found her at last, drew her to him and even kissed her. Now all that remained of that was a pause and a look, and if anyone had asked him why he did it, Salomon Meijer himself would have had to ponder.

Golde had grown fat over the years, she hurried stoutly through life, a hasty peasant sowing seeds, she wore her dress with the black silk ribbons as a pot wears a tea-cosy, and her reddish sheitel, even though it was made by the best wig-maker in Schwäbisch Hall, sat on her head like a bird’s nest. She had developed the habit of pulling her lower lip deep into her mouth and chewing on it, which made her look toothless. Sometimes it seemed to Salomon as if at some point – no, not at some point, he had to correct himself – as if, after that lengthy and painful childbed, after those uselessly wailed-through nights, a young woman had left him and a matron had taken her place. But he could not reproach Golde for that, and he who finds a virtuous woman, as the Bible says, has gained riches beyond rubies. He said it every week, paused and looked searchingly around.

The frock coat now hung over the arm of the leather armchair in which Salomon liked to rest after a long day on the country road, but which today he had offered to the rebbe, Rav Bodenheimer. Now the chairs had to be lined up in a row again, order had to be re-established around Uncle Melnitz, whose chin hung on his chest as if he was dead.

‘Well? I’m hungry!’ cried Salomon from the kitchen.

Usually, or rather whenever the man of the house was not away on business, the Meijer household ate in the front room, which Mimi liked to call the ‘drawing-room’, while her parents called it the ‘parlour’ plain and simple. Today the big table in there had been pushed up against the wall, so that the Shabbos lamp hung in the void, they had had to make room for the visitors, a lot of room, because Salomon Meijer was a respected man in Endingen, a leader of the community and administrator of the poor box. Anyone who had raised a glass of kirschwasser ‘to life’ at his Simchas also came to him at a shiva to pay his respects, not least because one could never know when one might need him. Salomon acknowledged this without reproach.

So for once they ate in the kitchen, where Chanele had already got everything prepared. She was a poor relation, said the people in the community, even though the old women most skilled in Mishpochology were unable to say exactly which branch of the Meijer family tree she might have sprouted from. Salomon had brought her back, more than twenty years ago now, from a business trip to Alsace, a wailing, wriggling bundle, swaddled like a Strasbourg goose. ‘Why would he have taken her in if she hadn’t been related to him?’ asked the old women, and some of them, whose teeth had fallen out and who therefore thought the worst of everyone, suggested with a significant nod of the head that Chanele had exactly the same chin as Salomon, and that one might wonder what had taken him to Alsace so often in those days.

The truth of the matter had been quite different. The goyish doctor had explained to Salomon that the son that they had had to dismember to get him out of his mother had torn Golde so badly that she would not survive another difficult birth; he should be grateful that he had at least one child, even if it was only a girl. ‘Thank your God,’ he had said, for all the world as if there were several of them, and as if they had divided their responsibilities among themselves as clearly as the duty physician and the cattle vet.

Now everyone capable of thinking practically knows that one child on its own makes far more work than two, and when on one of his trips the opportunity presented itself – a mother had died in childbed and her husband had lost his mind over it – Salomon intervened with an investment as practical and unsentimental as buying a calf cheap and feeding it up until it paid for itself several times over as a milk cow.

So Chanele was not a daughter of the house, but neither was she a serving-girl; she was treated sometimes as one and sometimes the other, she was in no one’s heart and no one’s way. She wore clothes which she sewed herself or which Mimi didn’t like any more, and her hair was hidden away in a net, as if she were a married woman; she who has no dowry need not stay on the look-out for a husband. When she laughed she was even pretty, except that her eyebrows were too broad, they crossed through her face as one crosses through a calculation that is wrong or has been dealt with.

Chanele had laid the meal out on the kitchen table. There had been nothing to cook, because food is brought to a shiva to spare the mourners the task. Even so, a powerful fire was blazing in the stove, crackling fir logs that quickly gave off their heat. It was still freezing outside at night, although they would already be celebrating Seder in two weeks; Pesach fell early that year, 1871.

‘So?’

When Salomon Meijer was hungry, he grew impatient. He sat at the table, hands left and right on the wood, as the mohel lays out his instruments before a circumcision. He had already said HaMotzi, had sprinkled salt over a bit of bread, said the blessing over it and put it in his mouth. But after that he had not gone on to help himself, because he placed value on everyone sitting with him at table when he was, after all, at home. He could eat alone any day of the week. Now he drummed his right hand on the table-top, repeatedly lifting his wrist in rhythm, as musicians do when they wish to demonstrate their skill to the audience. His fingers danced, although it was not a cheerful dance, one that might easily, in a public house, have led to a fight.

Mimi came in at last, with a theatrically tripping step designed to demonstrate how much of a hurry she was really in. Although there was no real need, she had changed her clothes again, and was now wearing a mouse-grey dressing gown, slightly too long, so that the hem dragged along the stone floor. ‘Those people,’ she said. ‘All those people! Isn’t it ennuyant?’

Mimi loved precious words, as she loved everything elegant, she picked them up in goyish books that she borrowed secretly from Anne-Kathrin, the school-master’s daughter, and scattered her everyday conversation with them as if they were gold-dust. Inclined as she was towards refinement, she didn’t like the fact that everyone still called her Mimi, a children’s name that she had long – ‘Really, Mamme, for ages now’ – outgrown. At fifteen, and nobody could remind her of this for fear of provoking a storm of tears, she had once flirted with Mimolette, and Salomon, never averse to a joke, had actually called her that for a few days, before confessing with a laugh that in France it was the name of a cheese. Since then she had tried to gain acceptance at least for Miriam, which was her actual name, but had been unable to do anything about the old family habit.

Mimi had everything a beauty needs, immaculate white skin, full lips, big brown eyes that always glistened a little mistily, long, softly wavy black hair. But for some reason – she had spent hours at the mirror and been unable to find an explanation for it – the perfect individual parts didn’t really fit together where she was concerned, just as a soup sometimes simply refuses to taste right despite being made of the best ingredients. She gave no sign of this self-doubt, tending on the contrary to behave in an arrogant and even patronising manner, so much so that her mother had asked her more than once if she actually thought she was Esther out of the Bible, waiting for messengers, in search of the most beautiful virgins, to come to Endingen to bring her to their king.

Now the four of them were sitting around the table. There were bigger families in the community, but when Salomon Meijer considered his loved ones like this, he was quite content with what God had given him, a very practical contentment based on the fact – and who knows this better than a cattle dealer, who gets around the place? – that he could have been much worse off.

There was, as there always is after shivas, far too much food on the table. Three bowls alone of chopped boiled eggs, half a salted carp, a plate of herrings, but just a few, meagre herrings, for red-haired Moische was a stingy man, even though he had had a sign painted for his shop that was bigger than the premises itself. It was customary simply to put down the food one had brought, without a name and without a thank-you, but people knew the patters of the plates, knew to whom which crockery belonged – otherwise, how could they have given it back the next day? The pot of sauerkraut, it wouldn’t even have taken the broken handle to know, came from Feigele Dreifuss, known to everyone only as Mother Feigele, because she was the oldest in the village. Every autumn she made two big vats of sauerkraut with juniper berries, even though there had been no one in her house to eat it for a long time now, and then gave it away at every opportunity, brought it to women in childbed to strengthen them, and to the bereaved to comfort them.

On the sideboard, wrapped in a newspaper and shoved into the furthest corner like stolen goods, lay a plaited loaf, a beautiful berches scattered with poppy-seeds, which they would inconspicuously remove from the house tomorrow and feed to the ducks and hens. Christian Hauenstein, the village baker, in whose ovens they baked all their Shabbes loaves and warmed their Shabbes kugels, had sent it, of course without coming by himself. He was a modern man, a free-thinker, as he liked to stress, and wanted to prove to his Jewish customers that he valued them and nurtured no prejudices towards them. No one had ever had the heart to tell him that they couldn’t eat his well-intentioned loaves because they weren’t kosher.

But who needs bread when there’s cheesecake on the table? Above all when it’s the legendary cheesecake that only Sarah Pomeranz could bake. Naftali Pomeranz, whose very name revealed him as an incomer, might have been an important man, a slaughterer and a synagogue sexton, shochet and shammes, he even seemed to want to found a dynasty in these offices, and his son Pinchas, whom he was training up as his successor, was as skilled at delivering a clean slice to the throat as his father, but it was still Sarah who ensured the true reputation of the family with her cake, a masterpiece, everyone agreed, so good ‘that Rothschild himself could not eat finer’, and that was the highest accolade that the village could supply in matters culinary.

Salomon had asked for a second piece to be put on his plate, and chewed with pleasure as Golde, who was not made for sitting still, wondered, with her lower lip sucked in, what should be transferred to which bowl so that all the alien crockery could be washed clean and returned. Mimi toyed with a little piece of cake that she divided with her fork into ever smaller halves, while making the discreetly disgusted face of a doctor forced by his profession to conduct an unpleasant operation.

‘Tomorrow I must leave the house at four,’ said Salomon. ‘You can wrap up all the leftover cake for my journey.’

‘Almost all. A piece must be left for me.’ Chanele, whose uncertain position in the household had made her a good observer, knew precisely when she could risk such pert little remarks. Now Salomon had eaten well; that meant that he was in a benevolent mood.

‘Nu, so be it, part of the leftovers.’

Mimi pushed away her crumbled cake. ‘I don’t know why you all like it so much. It tastes ordinaire.’ She spoke the word with lips pursed, to stress the Frenchness of the word.

Golde took the plate, looked at it darkly – ‘the waste!’ her expression said – and put it with the other crockery that Chanele would later wash up. ‘Where are you off to tomorrow?’ she asked her husband, not out of genuine interest, but because an eyshes chayil asks the right questions.

‘To Degermoos. The young farmer, Stalder, has said he wants to talk to me. I can imagine what it’s about. He’s running out of hay. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him he’s putting too many cows out on his poor land. Now he wants me to buy them back. But I’m not buying. Who needs cows when the grass isn’t growing yet?’

‘And that’s why you’re going? Not to do a deal?’

‘Not this deal. There’s someone in Vogelsang with cow-pest in his herd. He has too much hay. I’ll tell Stalder, and he can stock up.’

‘What do you get out of it?’

‘Nothing today. And perhaps nothing tomorrow, either. But the day after tomorrow . . .’ Salomon ran his fingers through his sideburns, because of the cake-crumbs and because he was pleased with himself. ‘Sooner or later he’ll have a beheimes to sell, and it’ll be an animal that I can use. I’ll make him an offer, and he’ll take it because he’ll think to himself: The Jew with the brolly is a decent fellow. And then I will do my deal.’

The business with the brolly was this: whenever Salomon Meijer travelled across the country he carried with him a fat black umbrella, tied at the top so that the fabric puffed out like a bag. He used the umbrella as a walking stick, pressed it firmly down on to the ground with each step and left an unmistakeable trail on muddy paths or in the snow: the impressions of two hobnailed soles and to the right of them a row of holes as regular as the ones a tidy farmer’s wife would make when planting beans. The special thing about the umbrella, the thing people talked about, was that Salomon never opened it, whatever the weather. Even when the rain was cascading down as if the time had come for a new Noah and a new Ark, Salomon just drew his hat lower over his forehead, if it got very bad, pulled the tails of his long coat over his head and walked on, leaning on the umbrella and drilling the tip into the ground with every second step, so that the rain collected in a row of little lakes behind him. He was known because of this around Endingen, and laughed at because of it too, and if, like red-haired Moische, he had had a shop-sign painted, to bring customers to the right place it would have had to say not ‘Cattle-trading Sal. Meijer’, but ‘The Jew with the Brolly’.

Salomon belched pleasurably, as if after the big Shabbos sude, when it is practically a mitzvah, a god-pleasing act, to eat too much. Mimi pulled a face and murmured something to herself that was probably French but certainly contemptuous. Salomon took a pinch from his snuff-box, screwed up his nose and contorted his face into a grimace and finally sneezed, loudly and with a great sense of relief. ‘Now there’s only one thing I need,’ he said, and looked around expectantly. Chanele, since they would probably go on sitting in the kitchen for a while, had gone into the parlour to fetch the second paraffin lamp, and now she drew an earthenware bottle from one apron pocket, a pewter mug from the other, and set them both in front of him. ‘She can do magic like the Witch of Endor,’ Salomon said contentedly and poured himself a drink.

Then the conversation in the kitchen had fallen asleep, as a child suddenly falls asleep in the middle of a game. Chanele washed the crockery in the big brown wooden bucket; it clattered as if in the distance. Golde put the dried plates back in the cupboard, took the few steps individually for each plate, back and forth, a dance without a partner, to which Salomon, eyes closed, droned a tune, more out of repletion than musicality. Mimi reproachfully brushed invisible crumbs from her dressing gown and wondered whether she shouldn’t have chosen a different fabric; she had only taken this one because the shopkeeper had called it ‘dove-grey’, such a beautiful, soft, gleaming word. Dove-grey.

At the house next door – which was actually the same house yet a different one because the law demanded as much, at the other entrance of the house, then, there was a sudden hammering on the door, impatient and violent, as one knocks at the midwife’s door when someone is entering the world, or at the door of the chevra, the funeral fraternity, when someone is leaving it. It was not a time of day when people in Endingen paid a visit, either to Jews or to goyim. In the other half of the house, with its own front door and its own stairs, to meet the requirements of the law according to which Christians and Jews were not allowed to live in the same house, their landlord lived, the tailor Oggenfuss, with his wife and three children, peaceful people if you knew how to take them. They were good neighbours, which meant that they benignly ignored one another. The death of Uncle Melnitz, and all the mourners who had come to the house for seven days, had gone assiduously unnoticed by the Oggenfuss household, with the practised blindness of people who live closer together than they would really like to. And even now, when something unusual was going on, something practically sensational by Endingen standards, in the Meijers’ kitchen they merely looked quizzically at one another, and already Salomon shrugged his shoulders and said ‘So!’ – which in this case meant something like, ‘They can break the door down if they want to, it has nothing to do with us.’

Footsteps were heard next door, a restless to-ing and fro-ing, from which, if one had been curious, one might have worked out that someone who had already gone to bed was looking for a candle, a spill, to light it from the embers of the oven fire, a shawl, to cover their night-shirt, then the shutter clattered against the wall, a noise that really belonged to early morning, and Oggenfuss, as unfriendly as fearful people are in unfamiliar situations, asked what was so urgent and what sort of behaviour was that, dragging people out of bed in the middle of the night.

A strange, hoarse voice, interrupted by a bad cough, gave an unintelligible answer. Oggenfuss, switching from Aargau dialect to High German, replied. The stranger repeated his sentence, from which one could now make out the words ‘please’ and ‘visit’, but in such an unusual accent that Mimi said with delight, ‘It’s a Frenchman.’

‘Sha!’ said Golde. She stood there with an empty bowl in her hand, in the open kitchen door, where the corridor acted as an amplifier, so that even if one wasn’t curious, one could hear everything going on in the street. But all that came from outside now was the coughing of the nocturnal visitor. Oggenfuss said something final, and a shutter upstairs was closed. Then Frau Oggenfuss could be heard, her words impossible to make out but her tone urgent. After a pause the stairs creaked next door, although no individual footsteps could be heard, the sound made when someone wears slippers, the front door was opened, and Oggenfuss said in the suffering voice of someone forced to show politeness that he doesn’t feel: ‘So? Who are you? And what do you want?’

The strange man had stopped coughing, but still said nothing. In the Meijers’ kitchen no one moved. When Salomon talked about it later, he said it was as if Joshua had made the moon stand still over the Valley of Ajalon. Chanele had taken a plate from the bowl; the dish-cloth had stopped in mid-air, and water dripped on the stone tiles. Mimi stared at a strand of hair that she had wrapped around her index finger, and Golde simply stood still, which was the most unusual thing of all, because Golde was otherwise always in motion.

And then the stranger had found his voice and said something that everyone in the kitchen understood.

He said a name.

Salomon Meijer.

Chanele, who never did such a thing, dropped the plate.

Salomon leapt to his feet, ran to the front door, opened it so that two men now stood on the same little pedestal, three steps above the frost-glittering street, one in night-shirt and night-cap, a woollen blanket over his shoulders, a candle in his hand, the other, although without a frock coat, very correctly dressed. They stood almost side by side, for the two doors of the house were only an arm’s length apart. Oggenfuss made an exaggeratedly polite gesture which made the blanket slip from his shoulders, and said in a formal voice that contrasted strangely with his half-naked state: ‘It’s you the gentleman wants to see, Herr Meijer.’ Then he vanished into his half of the house and slammed the door behind him.

The man in the street began to laugh, coughed and painfully doubled up. In the faint light that came from the house he could only be seen indistinctly, a slim figure apparently wearing a white fur cap.

‘Salomon Meijer?’ asked the stranger. ‘I’m Janki.’

Only now did Salomon see that it was not a fur cap, but a bandage.

2

It was a thick, dirty white lint bandage, inexpertly wrapped around the man’s head, with a loose end that hung over the stranger’s shoulder like an oriental ribbon. Nebuchadnezzar out of the illustrated Bible stories wore a turban exactly the same shape, in the picture in which Daniel interprets his dream. Except that the Persian king’s turban was adorned with diamonds, not with blood. A couple of inches above his right eye a bright red spot had spread on the bandage, but if there was a fresh wound underneath it seemed to have stopped hurting. A few black curls peeped from under the edge of the white fabric. ‘A pirate,’ thought Mimi, because there had also been sea-robbers in the books that she secretly borrowed.

The stranger’s face was narrow, his eyes big and his lashes noticeably long. His skin was tanned, like that of someone who works outside a great deal, which irritated Salomon; the winter had been so long, that now, with spring apparently so reluctant to come, even the peasants were pale. In his dark face, his teeth looked remarkably white.

They had lots of time to look at him, they could study at their leisure his red and black uniform jacket, whose insignias did not match those of any troop known hereabouts, they were able to marvel at the Bohemian-looking double-knotted yellow silk kerchief that contrasted so defiantly with the rough material of the jacket; they were able to look at his narrow hands, the deft, mobile fingers, the nails, clean and neat in an unsoldierly fashion, and try to interpret what they saw as they might have interpreted an obscure verse of the Bible. Everyone seemed to be using a different commentary: Salomon saw the stranger as a scrounger, to be kept at arm’s length because he wanted something from you; Golde was reminded of the son who, had God so willed it, would have been the same age right now as this unexpected young guest; Mimi had moved on from pirates and decided he was an explorer, a global traveller who had seen everything and had much more still to see. Chanele was busy at the stove, and didn’t seem interested in the solution of this mystery that had dropped in out of nowhere; except the line of her eyebrows was higher on her face than usual.

The visitor didn’t wait to be offered a chair, he chose a seat at the table, his back so close to the stove that Golde was worried he would burn himself. But no, he replied, if someone had been as cold as him, nothing could ever be too hot again.

And then he ate. And how he ate!

Even before the water was put on for his tea, he grabbed, without bothering to ask, the goyish berches, he tore fist-sized pieces from it with his unwashed hands, and without a word of blessing, and stuffed it into his mouth. He went on bolting it down even when Salomon told to him why the bread wasn’t kosher, he choked in his greed, he coughed and spat half-chewed chunks on the table. Even Mimi’s dove-grey housecoat got a spatter, which she rubbed away with her finger before, when everyone else was looking at the strange guest, sticking it quickly in her mouth.

Nothing was left of the chopped eggs, the carp had disappeared, so had the herrings, and even the pot of Mother Feigele’s sauerkraut, which could have satisfied a big family for a week, was more than half empty. Eventually Golde looked questioningly at her husband, and he nodded resignedly and said, ‘Very well, then.’ Golde went into the little room in which the window behind the bars was always slightly open, brought in the package that she’d been keeping cool, then set it down on the table in front of the stranger and pulled open the cloth. And he, even though he had already eaten more than a whole minyan of pious men after a feast day, stared as ecstatically at Sarah’s cheesecake as the children of Israel once gazed upon the first manna in the desert.

Then the cake too was devoured to the very last crumb. The man had set aside his cutlery, and instead clutched a steaming glass so firmly that it was easy to tell: he hadn’t yet warmed up. Chanele had prepared the special mixture that was known in this family as Techías Hameisim tea, because it was said to be able to raise the dead; candy sugar dissolved in a camomile brew with honey and cloves and a big shot of schnapps from Salomon’s private bottle. The stranger drank in great slugs. It was only when he had emptied a second glass that he began to tell his story.

He spoke Yiddish, just as they all spoke Yiddish, not the supple, musical language of the East, but the ponderous, peasant form common in Alsace, the Great Duchy of Baden and of course here in Switzerland, too. The melody was slightly different – more elegant, Mimi thought – but they had no trouble understanding each other.

‘So I’m Janki,’ said the man, whose coughing seemed to have calmed down. ‘You will have heard of me.’

‘Perhaps.’ A cattle dealer never says ‘yes’ too quickly, and never too quickly ‘no’. Salomon knew lots of Jankis, but not one in particular.

‘I come from Paris. That is to say: I actually come from Guebwiller.’

Salomon pushed back his chair, as he always did, without noticing it himself, when he started to become interested in a business deal. Paris was far away, but Guebwiller was a known quantity.

‘Did the son of your uncle Jossel marry into Guebwiller?’ Golde asked Salomon. ‘What was his name again?’

To her surprise it was the strange man who answered her question. ‘Schmul,’ he said. ‘My father’s name was Schmul.’

‘Was,’ he had said, not ‘is’, so they all murmured their blessing for the Judge of Truth before they all started talking at once.

‘You are . . .?’

‘He is . . .?’

‘What uncle Jossel would that be?’

An uncle, according to traditional Jewish practice, is not just the brother of the father or the mother. Even a much more distant relation can be an uncle; the tree is important, not the individual branch. Salomon hadn’t really known this uncle Jossel, he just thought he remembered a small, nimble man who had danced for so long at a chassene that the trumpeter’s lips had hurt. But at the time Salomon had been fifteen or sixteen, an age when one is interested in all kinds of things, just not strange relatives who come all the way to a wedding and then disappear again.

‘What uncle Jossel?’ Mimi asked again.

‘He was a son of Uncle Chaim, who you don’t know either,’ Salomon tried to explain, ‘and his father and my great-great grandfather were brothers.’ And he added after a pause, ‘I think. But am I Mother Feigele?’ Which was supposed to mean: if you want to know more, ask someone who has nothing more sensible to do than deal with family trees all day.

‘Mishpocha, then.’ Mimi sounded strangely disappointed.

‘But very distant mishpocha,’ said Janki and smiled at her.

‘He has lovely white teeth,’ she thought.

‘My father, Schmul Meijer,’ explained Janki, ‘actually came from Blotzheim—’

‘Exactly!’ said Salomon.

‘—and moved to Guebwiller, because my mother owned an inn there, which the peasants particularly liked to go to. In Guebwiller there’s a market every week. That is: the pub belonged to my grandfather, of course, but he wanted to be a scholar, and when his daughter married, he passed everything to the young couple. I only ever saw him in the pub room sitting over a big tome, at his table by the window. He murmured to himself as he studied, and when I was a little boy I thought he could do magic.’

His voice became hoarse again, and Chanele quickly refilled his glass.

‘But he couldn’t do magic,’ said Janki, when he had drunk. ‘During the cholera epidemic of 1866 he wrote amulets and hung them above all the doors. Except that the disease probably couldn’t read his handwriting.’

‘He died,’ said Golde, and it wasn’t a question.

‘They all died.’ Janki stirred his finger in his glass and stared into it, as if nothing in the world could be more interesting than a whirlpool of boiled camomile blossoms. ‘In three days. Father. Mother. Grandfather. The old man held out the longest. Lay on his bed, his eyes wide open. Not blinking. He probably thought the angel of death could do nothing to him as long as he stared it in the face. But in the end he blinked.’ He paused and then added, still without looking up from his glass, ‘I can still smell their beds. Cholera doesn’t smell of roses.’ He shook a drop from his finger, as one does at Seder, when one gives away ten drops of the feast wine so as not to be too happy about the ten plagues of the Egyptians.

‘I could have a son his age,’ thought Golde. ‘And he could be an orphan already. Praised be the Judge of Truth.’

‘You have no brothers and sisters?’ she asked, and it was the first time anyone in the house had called him Du, not Ihr, as they would have addressed a stranger.

‘It isn’t easy to be the only one,’ Janki replied, and Mimi nodded, without noticing. ‘That is: it isn’t hard. One is responsible only for oneself, and that is fine.’

Mimi was still nodding.

‘Everyone expected me to go on running the pub. I wasn’t yet twenty, and I was to spend my whole life pouring schnapps, washing glasses, cleaning tables and laughing at the stories of the drunk peasants. I didn’t want that. But on the other hand: that was what my parents had left me. If it was good enough for them – who was I to want something else?’

‘So you made up your mind?’

Janki shook his head. ‘It was taken away from me. People stopped coming to the inn. Too many people had died in the house, and the suspicious peasants no longer found it quite heimish. I got a decent price for it, not very good, not very bad, and with that I went to Paris.’

‘Why Paris?’ asked Chanele, who had listened in silence until that moment.

‘Do you know a better city?’ he asked back, folded his hands behind his head and leaned far back. ‘Does anyone know a better city?’

It was a question that no one in this kitchen could answer.

‘I wanted to get away from Guebwiller. I wanted to be something that would mean I never had to go back there. Something special, something strange.’

Explorer, thought Mimi. Pirate.

‘I wanted to go where the masters are. Just as some people go to Lithuania or Poland because a rabbi that they want to emulate teaches there. Except I wasn’t looking for a rabbi.’

‘But?’

‘A tailor.’

If Janki had said ‘a knacker’ or ‘a gravedigger’, the disappointment around the table could not have been greater. A tailor was more or less the most ordinary thing they could think of, there were tailors on every street-corner, a tailor was neighbour Oggenfuss, a lanky, short-sighted man who sat on his table all day and was bossed around by his wife. A tailor? And that was why he had gone to Paris?

Janki laughed when he saw their baffled faces, he laughed so hard that his coughing started up again and his face contorted. He held the end of his bandage in front of his mouth like a handkerchief and gesticulated for more tea with his other hand. When the attack had settled down again, he went on speaking in a very quiet, careful voice, like someone setting a sprained foot hesitantly on the ground.

‘I ask your forgiveness. It’s the cold. And the hunger. But at least I’m still alive. That is: I’ve even been living very well since I’ve been here. What was I going to say?’

‘A tailor,’ said Mimi, holding the word between pointed fingers.

‘Of course. A tailor in Paris, you must know, is not simply someone who stitches a pair of trousers together always using the same cut, or, when making a skirt, considers how much fabric he can have left over. Of course, there are such tailors, and there are many of them. But the ones I mean, the real ones, are something quite different. It’s like . . . like . . .’ He looked around the kitchen in search of a suitable comparison. ‘Like a sunrise compared with this oil lamp. These men are famous artists, you understand. Great gentlemen. They don’t bow to their customers. They never pick up a needle themselves. They have other people to do that.’

‘A tailor is a tailor,’ said Salomon.

‘Perhaps in the village. But in a proper city. Not,’ he made his voice higher, as one does in the minyan, when after the naming of the divine names everyone is supposed to reply with a blessing, ‘not if one is called François Delormes.’

No one in the house had ever heard of François Delormes.

‘I have worked for him. He was the best, a prince among tailors. Someone who could even afford to say no to the emperor.’

‘Well,’ said Salomon, who was used to being suspicious if someone over-praised a deal to him, ‘it can hardly have been the emperor.’

‘It was his valet. The personal valet of Napoleon the Third. He came to Monsieur Delormes and ordered a tailcoat. For the emperor. A midnight blue tailcoat with silver embroidery. Says Delormes: No. Why not? inquires the valet. And Delormes replies: Blue doesn’t suit him. Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘It can’t have happened.’

‘I was there. I have held in my own hand the swatch of fabric chosen by the valet.’

‘Midnight blue,’ said Mimi quietly. It sounded even more elegant than ‘dove grey’.

‘So you’re a tailor?’ Chanele, who had been standing the whole time, now sat down at the table with the others. ‘What sort of tailor?’

‘None at all,’ said Janki. ‘I soon realised that I’m not cut out for it. I may have the skill, but not the patience. I am not a patient man. All day one stitch and another stitch and another stitch, and all exactly the same length – it’s not for me. No, I worked in the fabric store. I was there when the customers came. Showed them the patterns. The bolts of material. We had a selection . . . There was shantung silk in more than thirty different colours.’

‘Shantung silk,’ Mimi thought, and knew that she would never like another fabric more for the rest of her life.

‘I learned a lot,’ said Janki. ‘About materials. About fashion. Above all about the people who can afford both. And they began to get to know me too. I started to become someone. Somebody advised me to set up on my own. Wanted to lend me money. In the end I rented a little shop with a little flat. And then I made my mistake.’

‘Mistake?’ asked Golde, startled.

‘I came back to Guebwiller to collect the few pieces of furniture that I’d left with a drayman. They were glad when I arrived. They gave me a cordial welcome. Took me in their arms and wouldn’t let me go, those swine!’ He had been speaking in muted tones, but he shouted those last words so loudly and with such fury that Golde looked fearfully at the wall, behind which the Oggenfuss family must have long been asleep.

‘How nice that you’re here, they said.’ Janki’s voice had become quieter and quieter, but there was something in it that made Mimi think, with a pleasantly creepy shudder: ‘If he had to kill somebody, he would poison them.’

‘We’ve been waiting for you, they said. You’re on the list, they said. They’d had enough time to manipulate them. There’d been nobody there to take my side, to bribe the right man at the right time. I was on the list, and there was nothing to be done about the list. And so, rather than opening a shop in Paris, I was marched to Colmar along with two dozen others, and became a soldier. Twentieth Corps. Second Division. Fourth Battalion of the Régiment du Haut-Rhin.’

There are wines that you have to drink quickly once the barrel has been tapped, otherwise they go sour. As long as the bunghole is firmly closed, they keep for years, but once they’ve been opened . . . Janki’s story came bubbling out of him, and like a badly kept wine there were some things floating around in them that might have spoiled one’s thirst or curiosity.

He talked about his training, ‘The same thing a thousand times, as if you were a fool, an idiot, or were to be made into a fool’, about the marching that his fine city boots hadn’t endured for long, ‘If you wrap rags around your feet, you have to soak them in urine first, it’s good for the blisters,’ about the officers’ horses, which were treated better than the young recruits, ‘because horses kick’. He talked about what it feels like when you’re crammed together with people you have nothing in common with, how you have to smell and taste and put up with them, how you have to listen to their jokes, in which you yourself come up as a caricature again and again, ‘Their second favourite subject was food and their third favourite the Jews.’

But even when he was talking about things so revolting that Mimi had to shake herself like someone who’s had her throat burned by rough brandy, but who knows already that the next slug will taste better and the one after that better still, even if he was describing experiences that made Golde involuntarily stretch out her hand, as if she had to pull him away and bring him to safety, indeed, even when he suggested experiences that cannot be avoided when young men live in such close proximity – Chanele raised her eyebrows and Salomon uttered a warning ‘Now, then!’ – even then his story had an undertone of longing, a memory of times that might not have been good but were better than the ones that came after. And they all knew what had come after. Even in Endingen, where the waves of world history lapped only wearily at the shore, they knew about the war, they had heard of the imprisonment and deposition of the Emperor, of the big battle on the first of September in which a hundred thousand Frenchmen had fallen – and Janki had perhaps been there, had experienced the horrors of that day and had now, by some miracle, a real nes min hashamayim, got away.

‘No,’ said Janki and made a sound that might have been a laugh, a cough or a sob, it was impossible to tell, ‘I wasn’t in Sedan. We new recruits didn’t make it that far. They did make us swear oaths. To the Emperor. Or to the fatherland. To something or other. I don’t remember. An ancient colonel spoke the oath for us. One of the ones who have to hollow their backs so that their medals didn’t topple them over. With a high, squeaking voice. And then, standing in rank and file, we couldn’t make out what he said. So I swore something and have no idea what it was.’ This time it was unambiguously a laugh, but not a pleasant one. ‘If we were engaged in a cattle-trade,’ thought Salomon, ‘I wouldn’t buy now.’

‘I don’t know what I would have done in a battle,’ said Janki. ‘I would probably have tried to run away.’

‘No,’ thought Mimi. ‘You wouldn’t have done that.’

‘But it didn’t come to that. All we did was march. I never found out whether we were marching away from the Germans or towards them. Marching, marching, marching. Once for fifteen hours straight, and in the end we were back in the same village we’d started from. Six hours there and nine hours back. Without food and water. We weren’t marching at the end, we were creeping on two legs. But I never saw an enemy soldier. They had no time for us. They were too busy winning the war. When the old colonel with the bird voice, the oberbalmeragges from the oath-swearing, told us it was all over, we lay on the floor like dead flies, too exhausted to get up and listen. And he used such beautiful patriotic words. If we’d believed him, the capitulation was a triumph. Why not? What was the point of being in a war if you can’t be a hero afterwards? I’ll tell my children I fought like a lion.’

They were all polite and didn’t ask the question. But even evasive eyes can pierce like needles. Chanele rubbed a dry plate still drier, Golde sucked her lower lip, and Salomon was earnestly preoccupied with a renegade strand in his sideburns. Only Mimi started to say, ‘Where did . . .?’ but stopped mid-phrase and ran her hand over her brow, at the exact position of the bloodstain on Janki’s dirty white turban.

‘The bandage?’ he asked. ‘Oh, yes, the bandage.’

He stretched his arm out in an elegantly demanding gesture, a young prince in one of Mimi’s novels, inviting a pretty kitchen-maid to dance. ‘If you would care to help me, Mademoiselle?’ he said to Chanele.

He untied the knot himself, but then she was the one who unrolled the bandage, slowly and carefully, as one unwinds the strips of cloth around the scrolls of the Holy Scripture. It was so quiet in the kitchen that everyone gave a start when the first coin fell to the floor.

Only Janki didn’t move. ‘Thieving is rife among one’s dear comrades,’ he said. ‘One has to come up with a good hiding place for one’s small fortune.’

‘He’s a pirate,’ thought Mimi.

‘He’s a ganev,’ thought Salomon.

There was another clatter on the stone tiles, then Chanele was ready and collected the coins from the bandage as soon a they appeared. What lay neatly aligned on the table at last, in silver and twice even in gold, was a minted picture book of French history, Louis XV, a fat baby, Louis XVI, a fat grown-up, the winged genius of the Revolution, Napoleon as a Greek bust, Louis XVIII with his pigtails, Louis-Philippe with his laurel wreath and Napoleon III with his tufted beard.

‘The blood on the bandage was real,’ said Janki. ‘But luckily it wasn’t mine.’

And then, now apparently as wide awake as he had been exhausted when he arrived, he told them how they had marched off again after the armistice, marched, marched, marched, about how no one had known where they were going because none of their superiors had told them anything – ‘They keep you stupid, because otherwise no one would stay a soldier’ – about how the rumour had gradually spread that their general, who hadn’t been able to win the war, now wanted at least to win the defeat, that it was no longer a matter of beating the Germans but just not falling into their hands, how they had finally, completely exhausted, crossed the border and, with ludicrous pride, fallen in step once more on the snow-covered road with the soldiers of the Swiss Confederation – ‘Basically they were a pathetic shower, and we were a whole army’ – how they had bundled their rifles into clean pyramids, always eight and then eight again, how the officers had been allowed to keep their swords, of course, how the senior gentlemen had behaved correctly and even genially towards one another, regardless of whether they were interning or internees – ‘When they aren’t actually shooting at each other, they’re a big mishpocha. His eyes turned moist as he described what their first soup had tasted like, how it had been ladled from the big pot, boiling hot, but how no one wanted to wait, not for so much as a minute, how they had burned their mouths and been happy none the less, and how a Swiss soldier – ‘He wore a uniform, but he spoke like a civilian’ – had apologised to them, actually apologised for not having anything better to offer than a pile of straw on the floor of a barn – ‘As if we would otherwise have been sleeping on a downy bed, with silk nightcaps’ – how they had at last had time to rest in the camp, how they had slept, just slept, for a night and a day and another night. He was talking faster and faster, the way you get faster and faster during the last prayer on the Day of Atonement because the time of fasting is over and food is waiting, he described how the camp had not been a camp at all, just a village, a snowed-in peasant village in the Alb, where the guards were just as bored as those they guarded, and how they started to talk to each other, how useful his Yiddish was to him, how he had befriended a soldier from Muri who wanted to try out his stumbling French on him, and he copied the man, jumping about like a badchen entertaining the guests at a wedding, and he demonstrated how he had copied him word for word without having even the faintest understanding of the meaning – ‘Dancing a minuet in wooden clogs’ – he made them laugh and yet felt troubled by their laughter, didn’t want to be interrupted, just as he hadn’t tolerated interruption over dinner, and he uttered his tale like a prayer whose every section had been repeated a thousand times: how the soldier demanded three Louis d’Or from him, but had then been negotiated down to only one, how he even wrote down the journey, from large town to large town, how simple it had been to walk out among the patrols, either because they didn’t expect escape attempts or because they didn’t care – ‘One more, one less, what did it matter?’ – and he told them how he had marched, marched, marched, marched, only by night at first, but soon by day as well, how he had slept in haystacks and once in a kennel, pressed up against the farm dog, which shivered just as much as he did, and he told them how he had begged, unsuccessfully, from suspicious farmers who begrudged him so much as a word of greeting, how once, at the market in Solothurn, he had stolen a brown cake filled with almond paste, the best, best, best that he had ever tasted in his life, how ‘Endingen’ had become a magic word for him, all those endless days, how he had given himself courage, how he had cried, just with happiness, when someone told him, just one more town, then he’d be there, how he’d felt as if the tears were freezing on his face, how he had arrived at last, chilled to the bone and almost starving, and then a goy had opened the door to him and yelled at him, and how he was there now and wanted to stay there, with his relatives, for ever.

‘For ever?’ Salomon thought.

‘For ever,’ thought Mimi.

3

Next morning Janki had a high fever.

His cold, only temporarily concealed by the excitements of the previous evening, had returned invigorated, if it was indeed only a cold and not, heaven forfend, bronchitis or worse. Salomon had set off for Degermoos early in the morning, without seeing his guest again, and so it was left to the three women to tend to the patient.

They had set up a bed for him in the attic room, and there he lay now, his whole body boiling hot and still shivering with cold. His vacant eyes were open wide, but if you moved your hand in front of them, the pupils didn’t follow the movement. Every now and again a dry cough shook Janki’s body, as if an unknown person were hammering his chest from within. His lips trembled, like a premature baby that wanted to cry but didn’t yet have the strength, or an old man who had already used up all the tears that life had assigned him.

The room was dark and sticky. Up here, where only a shnorrer would ever have spent the night, there was no real window, just a hatch that could be opened a crack to let in a little light and air. But outside it was icy cold and frozen, one of those jangling late winter days when every breath cuts your throat, and Golde said Janki had – me neshuma! – had enough. So the hatch remained closed, and lest the patient be left entirely in the dark, they had had to light some flickering candles that almost went out every time someone’s skirt stirred in the cramped room. Practical Chanele suggested putting the candles in jars, but Mimi emphatically resisted the idea, and when Chanele asked for a sensible reason, Mimi wiped tears from her eyes and refused to answer. The inexpressible reason, and Golde felt this exactly as her daughter did, was of course that such candles would have looked like the commemorative ones set up on the day of a relative’s death.

Among the candles on the old bedside table – one leg was missing, and they had had to put a plank of wood underneath it – framed by the flickering wicks, lay Janki’s yellow neckerchief, in which Golde had tied his coins, all the kings, emperors and revolutionary spirits. She avoided looking there, because when she held the heavy lump in her hand, a thought of which she was still ashamed had passed through her mind. ‘Enough for a levaya,’ she had thought, ‘enough money for a funeral.’

Trying to do something good for Janki, the three women jostled one another by his bed, elbow to elbow. With a damp cloth Chanele dabbed away the white crust that kept forming on his lips, like a baby bringing up sour milk. Golde tried to pour a slip of lukewarm tea between his lips, but it just ran down his chin to the collar of his shirt. The trail of fluid shimmered for a moment on his hot skin, and had then vanished again. Mimi had fetched a comb, her own comb, and cleared the hair from his damp forehead for the third time.

Then Janki suddenly began to speak.

It was more of a murmur, turned inwards, not outwards, he was saying something to himself to remind himself or to forget. They couldn’t make out the words, even though they were always the same few syllables, over and over and over.

‘He’s praying,’ said Golde, and forbade herself from thinking what prayer a man who was seriously ill might utter.

‘Perhaps he’s hungry,’ said Chanele.

‘Sha!’ said Mimi, and bent so low over the sick man that his smell, unsettlingly clean and slightly sour like bread dough, enveloped her as if she were caught in its embrace. Her ear was close to his mouth, but she didn’t feel his breath, just sensed the words, which were French but incomprehensible, and which made her pointlessly jealous, an alien conversation in which she was not involved. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said more loudly than necessary. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He is ill, and he needs peace and quiet, and, generally speaking, us treading on each other’s feet here won’t help him.’ And with those words she ran from the room, they heard her footsteps on the stairs, and the other two women, who had known Mimi for a lifetime, took a look to agree that she would now shut herself away in her room and there would be no sign of her for the next few hours.

‘Then I’ll go to Pomeranz,’ said Golde after a brief silence. Where Techías Hameisim tea did not help, she liked to deploy her most powerful weapon in the battle against illnesses of all kinds: a beef broth cooked so fiercely that a whole pound of meat produced only a single cup. Usually she would have sent Chanele to shochet Pomeranz to fetch the piece of stripped flank, but the short walk through the cold air would do her good, she thought, it would clear her head, foggy from the stuffy air. ‘You take care of things in the meantime,’ she said to Chanele, and was already outside the door.

Freed equally from Golde’s clucky concern and from Mimi’s impractical over-eagerness, Chanele first of all opened the hatch in the roof – even with a fever, she said to herself, you can’t freeze under a thick eiderdown – blew the candles out, then sat down by the bed with a bowl of vinegar water and methodically changed the cold compresses that were supposed to draw the fever to the feet and from there out of the body. Once, struggling with the stranger