‘Damn it, Landolt! Drive!’
40
Mimi ate liqueur chocolates for medical reasons. Dr Wertheim had actually prescribed port for her frail constitution, but Mimi couldn’t stomach alcohol — ‘I will never understand how anyone can enjoy getting tiddly!’ — and actually had to force herself at least to take the recommended stimulant in this form. If she now put the fourth of these balls of sweetness into her mouth, it was entirely Désirée’s fault.
You trust your children, you make sacrifices for them, and then something like this happens!
She had become quite dizzy with excitement, and her migraine was announcing its presence again. She drew little circles on her temples with her fingertips, leaving fine traces of chocolate.
‘Good that you’re back, Désirée,’ she said and smiled tragically. ‘So you’ve been out with Esther Weill?’
‘Yes, Mama,’ said Désirée, looking rather surprised. Esther Weill, of the shoe-shop Weill’s, was her best friend, and Mimi had never before objected to the two of them going walking or visiting exhibitions together.
‘And you really saw a big fish in that booth, at the top of the square?’
‘Not a fish, Mama, a whale. A whale is a mammal.’
‘How nice,’ said Mimi in a worryingly benign voice. ‘How considerate of you to enlighten your stupid mother about such matters. So it’s a mammal? How interesting.’
Her hand reached for the next praline.
‘Of course it’s only a skeleton. But massive! Much bigger than I’d imagined. They have to transport it on three carts and reassemble it in each new town. The skull alone…’
‘The skull,’ said Mimi and turned a chocolate wrapped in shiny silver paper around in her fingers like a missile. ‘I’m particularly interested in that. What does it look like, this skull?’
‘Very long and narrow. Like an enormous bird’s beak.’
‘A bird’s beak. Very interesting.’ The little ball turned rotated faster and faster.
‘Are you quite all right, Mama?’
‘Me? Why ever not? I just always like to hear about all the things my daughter experiences. With her best friend. Describe this whale’s lower jaw?’
Désirée stared at her mother. ‘It’s lower jaw?’
‘Or do whales not have things like that? Perhaps because they’re mammals?’
‘I don’t understand what’s up with you, Mama.’
‘But I understand very well.’ Mimi had planned to remain quite calm, but now she struck the table. Brownish juice dripped from her fist onto the good table-cloth. ‘I understand that my daughter is lying to me.’
‘I…’
With an extravagant gesture that had something of a practised air — and she had actually tried it out two or three times as she waited for her daughter — Mimi set down the Tages-Anzeiger down in front of Désirée. The gesture didn’t have entirely the dramatic effect that she was looking for, because her fingers stuck to the paper. She irritably took her handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her hand clean.
‘Read!’ she said. ‘Page four. “Miscellaneous news”.’
Now it would not have been true to say that Mimi studied the newspaper every day. The small letters put too much of a strain on her eyes. But the new bishge, who had an urge for higher things, read the paper, which Pinchas subscribed to, every morning from cover to cover during her coffee break and, if Mimi was unable to avoid her, liked to repeat her newly acquired wisdom. Today it had been a very small news item, which she was absolutely unable to get over. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ she had asked, shaking her head.
‘A curious theft,’ read Désirée, ‘took place the night before last in Zurich. From the travelling natural history cabinet currently attracting the attention of the educated classes behind the Museum, the lower jaw of the skeleton of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) on display there was pilfered. According to Herr Marian Zehntenhaus, the owner of the booth, the missing piece of bone was almost three metres in length, and can only have been carried away on a cart. So far there is no trace of any perpetrator, but it is assumed that irresponsible night-time gangs lie behind this low crime. A reward of fifty francs is offered for any information about the location of the nobbled piece of skeleton. This generous sum is explained by the considerable scientific damage done by this senseless act of vandalism. In the view of Herr Zehntenhaus, an incomplete skeleton is entirely worthless and no longer suitable for exhibition purposes. So the booth on the Platzspitz remains closed until further notice. Tickets already purchased may be returned to the booking office.’
Désirée looked up from the newspaper, her face bright red.
‘Can you explain to me,’ said Mimi, her voice as sweet as her pralines, ‘can you please explain to your stupid mother how you and Esther Weill visited an exhibition that isn’t even open?’
‘We…’ said Désirée, fingering the piqué collar of her blouse. ‘We went…’
‘I don’t deserve this.’ Mimi’s powdered cheeks quivered like those of a wine connoisseur testingly sloshing a good wine around in his mouth. ‘If I were one of those mother hens who go around checking up on every single little thing their children do, then perhaps I might understand. But I’m not like that. Certainement pas. I have never in my life got involved. Never. That’s why it pains me so much that you have lately begun to consider it necessary to lie to me.’ She darted an exploratory glance at her hand and then, when it was seen to be satisfactory free of any traces of chocolate and liqueur, she brought it to her bosom. ‘It hurts me deep in my heart.’
‘I’m sorry, Mama.’
‘And you think that’s enough?’ Mimi dabbed the corners of her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘All my life I have sacrificed myself for you, you have no idea how I have suffered just to bring you into the world, tu m’as déchirée, ma petite, and this is the thanks I get now. You have secrets from me. See-crets.’ She stretched the word out as long as it would go.
‘Today Esther and I were…’
‘No, don’t say anything.’ Mimi, red-cheeked, was enjoying the drama of the scene. ‘I don’t want to know. If my daughter no longer trusts me, if I no longer have a daughter, then I must live with that. It breaks my heart, but if it is to be my fate, then I shall endure that too. That too,’ she repeated in a quiet voice, tilted her head to the side and, in a gesture that she had lately seen in the Municipal theatre, laid the back of her hand to her brow.
It took ten minutes and two more liqueur chocolates before Désirée was finally prepared to deliver her confession.
‘But you must promise me not to tell anyone.’
‘You know me, ma petite. No one can keep a secret as well as I. Lots of people have told me that.’
‘You swear?’
‘All right then,’ said Mimi. ‘I swear.’
And then, with a lot of fidgeting and blushing, it suddenly came out: Esther Weill, Désirée’s best friend, had an admirer.
‘A real admirer,’ said Désirée.
They met in secret, took long strolls, hand in hand, drank coffee in places that decent people didn’t go to, and where for that reason people weren’t afraid of being surprised by someone they knew, and Désirée supplied their alibi, nodded in agreement when Esther lied as brazenly to her parents as she herself had been lying to her trusting mother for weeks, invented details about events that they had never visited, even acquired brochures just to lend more credibility to their lies, had, for example, bought a flyer about the prepared whale skeleton for five Rappen, so many metres long, so many tonnes in weight, just because she didn’t trust her mother, who had once been young herself and knew very well what it’s like when your heart beats faster because of a man, a mother who had, after all, sympathy for the aberrations of young souls, whom one could confide in, in whom one should have confided long ago instead of coming up with silly fairy-tales that would sooner or later…