Janki helplessly spread his arms. He had no idea what Salomon was getting at.
‘It’s a mark. Something striking. Something that distinguishes me from all other Jews who deal with beheimes. Just as the pot in which I cook something in the inn when I have to stay there overnight, differs from all other pots. Because I make a mark on it. Three letters, a kaf, a shin and a resh, inside on the bottom. The word “kosher”. If the letters are still there next time I know: I can use the pot. You understand?’
Janki didn’t understand at all. How did they get from the horses to an umbrella and from the umbrella to a pot?
Salomon wouldn’t be hurried. He finished his thoughts as slowly and carefully as the Rav did when he put two distant quotations together to clarify a disputed passage. ‘I have assumed the habit of the umbrella so that people know who I am. The Jew with the brolly. The way you brand a mark on a horse’s rump, if you want to talk about horses. It’s been stolen from me twice, because there’s a rumour among the farm boys that it’s the place,’ and he pointed to the belly of the umbrella, where the black fabric swelled in the gentle spring breeze, ‘in which I keep my money. Nu, let them steal it. What does such an umbrella cost? I have three more like it at home.’ When Salomon laughed he kept his lips closed, and his cheeks with their little red veins went round like two apple halves.
‘I’m the Jew with the brolly. And people know: this Jew is honest. This Jew doesn’t cheat. We can rely on the Jew. Not that I give them presents. Then they would say: the Jew is stupid. If they leave a cow that I’m supposed to buy unmilked in the byre for two days, so that the udder looks firmer, then I laugh at them. But it must be exactly the same the other way around. If they come to the Jew with the brolly for the milk cow and want to check the rings on the horn to see how often she has calved before, the horns aren’t filed down. A beef bullock that someone buys from me won’t have thirsted at the salt lick and then greedily drunk its fill of water, so that it weighs a few pounds more on the scales. People know that, and that’s why they do their deals with me and not with anyone else. That’s how I live, that’s my parnooseh. And because that’s the case, and because that’s how it’s going to stay…’
‘But it’s a unique opportunity,’ Janki said pleadingly, knowing that he had lost the argument.
‘Because it’s how it’s to stay,’ Salomon went on, ‘I will not sell butcher Gubser horsemeat on a contract that will only mean he loses money. Have I made a name for myself for all these years, only to buy it from me for a few gold pieces and then throw it away?’ He pulled the tip of the umbrella out of the muddy ground with a quiet thwock and then went down the hill towards the byre, sticking the umbrella into the ground with every second step, as if to mark a boundary line.
There was something of the parson about master butcher Gubser, an unctuous tone that made him popular with the housewives who bought from his shop. He had the habit of repeating words that he didn’t mean two or three times, putting his fleshy red hand on his heart as if making an oath before a court.
‘Ah, the new relation,’ he said, and half-bowed to Janki. ‘I’ve heard of him. Welcome, welcome, welcome. A cattle trader too?’
‘A businessman too,’ replied Janki, and Salomon inflated his cheeks with his lips closed.
‘From France, I hear. Been at the Battle of Sedan. Must have been terrible. Terrible.’
‘There are nicer places to be than battlefields,’ said Janki, and Gubser laughed as loudly and heartily as if he had never heard a more polished bon mot.
‘Brilliant,’ he said, ‘brilliant, brilliant. But then you Jews have a way with words. That’s why one has to take such care when one’s doing business with you. But Herr Meijer knows I’m not blaming you. Everyone’s as God has made him. A calf isn’t a sheep, and a pig isn’t a goat.’
Salomon, resting his hands on the handle of his umbrella, seemed to be counting the empty swallows’ nests under the roof truss of the byre.
‘Today I need a cow,’ said Gubser. ‘A cheap cow with a lot of meat on its bones. Could even be old and tough. Sausages are sausages, whatever you put in them.’ He laughed loud and long, and when Janki didn’t join in with his laughter, he asked, ‘Didn’t he understand that, this Frenchman of yours?’
‘Doesn’t he understand me, or doesn’t he want to understand me?’ Salomon said to Golde a weeks later. ‘I ask him how he imagines his future, and he just looks at me and shrugs his shoulders and goes for a walk.’
‘He needs to recover. He has been ill, and has to do something for his health.’ Golde’s voice sounded muted, because her head was in the big cupboard in the bedroom, as if in a cave. Crouching on the floor, she was fishing from the very back corner all the things that you never throw away, and only ever pick up at the Pesach cleaning. She held out to her husband a shard of painted porcelain, part of the plate that had been broken and distributed almost twenty-five years ago on the day of their engagement, and they exchanged a smile as one can only smile after long years of marriage, assembled from equal parts of contented memory and almost-as-contented resignation.
‘Still,’ said Salomon. He helped Golde to her feet and tried not to remember how much lighter in body and soul she once had been. ‘He runs around the place, you never know where he’s going next, and if you want to exchange a word with him he doesn’t listen.’
‘He’s young,’ said Golde. ‘And he’s disappointed, it seems to me. What sort of business deal did he suggest to you?’
‘Not a clean one.’ Business deals were men’s affair. Salomon didn’t ask Golde why all the handleless cups and cracked glasses had to be cleaned so thoroughly once a year, only to gather dust again for twelve months in the bottom drawer. ‘I couldn’t go along with it. But that’s no reason to go walking around the world all on your own. People are talking.’
Golde filled her apron with cutlery, a peasant woman collecting pears in the autumn. She chewed on her lower lip, firmly resolved not to tell her husband, who always thought he knew everything and yet didn’t understand a thing, a word of what people were really saying. But then, already half way out of the room, he was stronger than she was. She turned around again and said, ‘He’s not always alone.’
‘My real name is Miriam,’ Mimi had said. ‘They call me Mimi because they treat me like a child. But I’m not a child any more.’
‘No,’ Janki had replied, ‘you’re not a child any more.’ And he had looked at her with a look, ‘with a look’, Mimi had told the schoolmaster’s daughter the same day, ‘that would make you blush if he wasn’t a relative.’
The friendship between the two young women went back to their childhood days. They had splashed together in the shallow water when they were still too little to understand that while they might have belonged to the same village they actually lived in different worlds. Anne-Kathrin had also played an important part in the episode with the rescued kitten; she had brought along the long-handled net that her father always took fishing, in the hope, never fulfilled, that the big, the really big pike would fall into his clutches. Now the two of them only ever met in secret, not because anyone frowned upon, or even prohibited, their having contact with one another, but because that secrecy had a charm of its own. A lock on a diary lends value to even the most trivial confession.
‘He has eyes…’ said Mimi. ‘Very long eyelashes that stroke his cheeks. And then when he opens them…’ She stretched her body as the kitten had once done when you stroked it behind its ears, and even the sound she made as she did so was like a miaow.
‘You’re in love,’ said Anne-Kathrin, and was quite envious.