‘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.’
They had then — ‘And like idiots we put up with it, at least on the first day’ — taken all the steaming hay-bales that the exhausted soldiers had torn apart to make a comfortable camp for themselves, and requisitioned them for themselves, straw for the troops, hay for the horses, and had even ridden out in the first few weeks, had straightened their backs and held their reins loosely between two gloved fingers, but then the hay had started running out, not to mention the oats, and at last the horses had only stood there, in stables where that was possible, but also just under the open sky, tied in long rows; attempts had been made to light big fires to warm them a little, but the smoke had only made them restless and bad-tempered.
‘There are some lovely animals among them,’ said Janki, ‘particularly the officers’ private horses, but most of them are of course luggage pullers, dray and coach horses, and you’re not going to win a show-jumping competition with those, but you might be able to drag a cannon out of the dirt. Hundreds of horses. Fodder for butchers.’
‘Well?’ said Salomon, and packed into that one syllable was a whole droosh, a sermon interpreting the verse of the scripture: ‘You shouldn’t tell a beheimes dealer, who’s only interested in cows, anything about horses.’
‘Now comes the bit that no one knows yet,’ said Janki and took Salomon by the sleeve, an intimacy that not even Golde allowed herself. ‘It’s to be a secret for as long as possible, so that no one does a private deal with it. But this schoolmaster disguised as a soldier gave the game away to me. They decided to sell all the French horses to pay for part of the expense of the detention. There’s going to be a big auction, in Saignelégier.’
‘So?’
Janki stared at Salomon, amazed and sympathetic, the way you might look at someone who’s been asked a riddle and is still looking for the solution even though it’s staring him right in the face. ‘“So?” you ask? There will be so many horses on the market that prices in Switzerland are bound to collapse. They’ll be so eager that they’ll carry the animals to our door, as long as we buy them.’
‘We won’t buy them.’
‘Yes, we will. After we’ve sold them.’
And then he described his plan to Salomon again, the plan he had hatched in the internment camp, he Janki Meijer, all by himself, the only thinking person amongst defeated, apathetic time-servers, the plan that had given him strength on his long march through Switzerland, that had warmed him in a stinking kennel, that had drawn him from his fever as if on a rope, because there was no time to lose, not a single day, because the opportunity was there now and it wouldn’t come back.
They would sell horsemeat to a butcher, ideally to master butcher Gubser, with whom Salomon would have made an agreement to sell horsemeat, on contract, due in one month, one hundred kilos, two hundred, five hundred, what did Janki know, as much as Gubser would take from them, they would offer him a price so cheap that he would think they’d gone meshuga, a metsiya that no one could resist, certainly not a goyish butcher, because, as Janki remembered from the pub in Guebwiller they were always prepared to pull a fast one. But when the contract came due and the meat had to be supplied, the prices for horses would have dropped to their lowest ever, the butcher would be furious — ‘But is that our problem?’ — and they would make a reyvech, enough to set up as a tailor or a cloth-dealer or whatever you liked. Janki was so sure of his argument that he dared to parody the cattle-trader, whose support he after all relied on, with comical distortions.
‘So?’ asked Janki.
Salomon Meijer stroked his sideburn. ‘A good sign,’ thought Janki, who didn’t know him. Salomon looked thoughtfully down the hill, at the stable less than two hundred yards away, where they were already waiting for him, then he rammed his umbrella into the soft soil, so that it seemed to stand all by itself, Moses’ rod before the Pharaoh. He leaned against a tree, as Rav Bodenheimer sometimes leaned against the bookshelf when he began to explain something in a lesson, and said, ‘Look at this umbrella!’
‘The umbrella?’
‘I always keep it with me, and I never put it up. Why?’