‘Narrishkeit,’ was all Chanele had to say on the matter.
42
A lady’s maid could be summoned with the buttons on the bell panel, who would be willing to help madam get dressed at any time, the cringing porter had assured them upon their arrival. To Janki’s annoyance, renewed every day, Chanele strictly refused to take advantage of this service, even though it was included in the price of the room and would thus be paid for anyway. Every time he demanded that she change her outfit for the promenade, the table d’hôte or a drinks party — he liked, since it was after all his field, to decide which dress was right for which occasion — he had to open all the complicated ribbons himself and tie them all again, and manoeuvre the thousand little hooks into the tiny eyes. Where does it say in the Shulchan Aruch that if a man wants to belong to fine society in his dotage, one has to help him in his meshugas?
Unlike Arthur, who as a child had loved to use every opportunity to get closer to his mother by giving her a helping hand of this kind, Janki hated this toilet service. But Chanele forced him to do it, precisely because she knew that her body, now old and flabby, was unpleasant to him. Janki loved the external, the effect; he had not had his suits tailored to be comfortable to wear, but so that he would look good in them. What he admired most about court tailor Kniže, who was increasingly easing out his old master Delormes from his personal Pantheon, was his ball suit, which, according to the Journal des Modes, he had once produced for a misshapen member of the imperial household, ‘so perfectly cut that the hump was no longer apparent’. When she wore one of her expensive dresses, Chanele was as he wanted to see her: the well-to-do wife of a successful businessman. In blouse and corset the woman standing there was just a grandmother with withered skin, and if Janki had bought her an expensive eau de toilette on their first stroll around Westerland, he had not done so by chance. He thought he smelled age and decay on her, and he couldn’t bear it because it scared him.
Janki was not unskilled as a dresser. He was familiar with fabrics and dresses, and when Chanele was fully disguised, as she herself put it, he also tried to find the right jewellery and accessories to go with it. It was the only part of the ritual that he enjoyed.
Today he had taken a summer outfit in ivory crépon from the wardrobe. For a reason that he never talked about, he was particularly fond of this dress. It was more than a dozen years ago now that he had once involuntarily listened in on the conversation of a couple he didn’t know, but he could still hear the wife’s loud voice. ‘What bothers me most about these Jewish women,’ she had said, ‘is that they are all so fat.’ The crépon dress was accompanied by an unusual patent leather belt that stressed Chanele’s narrow waist and made it clear to any observer that she didn’t need to hide her figure behind pleated tulle or artfully draped floral garlands. If Janki imagined who that imaginary observer was, he now thought always of his new friend Staudinger.
The spa orchestra in the Music Shell on the promenade now wore theatrical uniforms from the time of the Napoleonic War; there was a ‘Fatherland Concert’ on the programme, which meant that the eight musicians would have to play one military march after another, even though their instrumentation wasn’t really suited to it. But the sole trumpeter tried gamely, and the band leader — whom Monsieur Fleur-Vallée would have mocked as as a pitiful dilettante — had for once set his violin aside and instead rattled the instrument known as a Turkish crescent. The spa guests seemed to like it; the ladies hummed along with the memorable tunes, and sent the flower arrangements on their hats bobbing rhythmically; the men tapped their walking sticks on the ground in time with the music. A few children had shouldered the little spades with which they usually built castles on the beach, and marched eagerly back and forth under the orders of a twelve-year-old.
Chanele’s toilet — why did she object to being helped by a lady’s maid? — took time, and then Janki himself couldn’t decide between three different ties. When at last they reached the Music Shell, at a comfortable stroll as befitted the spa promenade, even though they had allowed good time, all the white painted chairs were already occupied. They were not the only ones who had to stand, but Janki, who was staying in the most expensive hotel in town, was extremely dissatisfied with the lack of foresight from the spa administration. There was not a sign of Staudinger, even though the selection of music would have been to his taste.
While Janki looked searchingly around, ready to doff his hat at any moment, even though no one knew him here apart from his railway acquaintance, Chanele gazed with fascination at the orchestra’s cellist, an elderly gentleman with fine, narrow features. The tunes of the Fatherland Programme were all written in the same 4/4 march rhythm, and the cellist seemed visibly to be suffering from the undemanding qualities of the music that he was having to play. He was indeed scraping his bow quite correctly — one, two, one, two — across the strings, but he kept his eyes closed, as if he could no longer bear to see the conductor with his Turkish crescent. He bobbed his head back and forth to a quite different rhythm, moving his lips as he did so. Chanele imagined that as he did his duty he was singing an inaudible counter-melody to himself, a song that belonged to him alone, and which no one could take from him.
After each individual piece of music the gentlemen applauded, and the ladies patted their fine gloves together. The short break produced each time the pages were turned was suddenly broken by a piercing cry, and a little boy in a sailor suit ran from the troop of drilling children, who were at that moment presenting their spades in file, and pushed his way through the rows of seats in search of his mother. Now children on the spa promenade were thoroughly tolerated; as long as they remained cute and silent even complete strangers patted them on the head and gave them a sixpence for their piggy-banks. But this little boy was noisy, his cries were penetrating and to top it all he carried behind him a spade that was doubtless full of sand and dirt, without paying the slightest heed to the dresses of the ladies that he was barging into. He drew behind him a trail of disapproving comments and severe pedagogical glances, just as the dust of the street hangs in the air when a car has driven past. The boy was aware of none of this. He couldn’t find his mother, and had a terrible outrage to complain to her about, so he yelled at the top of his little lungs.
‘Mamme!’ yelled the little boy. ‘Mamme!’
Chanele handed Janki the parasol on which he had insisted, pulled her arm out from his as one pulls a thread from a needle, and left him standing. Her laced ankle-boots were made for elegant promenading; it was not so easy to reach the other side of the audience quickly enough. She was watched with looks of disapproval; this must have been the unfortunate mother who was incapable of keeping her child under seemly control.
The little boy came shooting out of the rows of seats headfirst; he must have tripped over a slyly extended parasol, or even over his own feet. He had lost his spade, but he didn’t care, he just wanted to be hugged and hidden and comforted.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Chanele.
‘I want to be a soldier too!’ the boy wailed. He said it in Yiddish, of exactly the same hue that Chanele knew from her son-in-law Zalman.
With a ching of the Turkish crescent and a boom of the kettledrum the music started up again, and the sound seemed to make the boy so miserable that he buried his tear-stained face in Chanele’s dress and clung to her desperately with his hands. She would never get the stains out of that delicate crépon.