Mimi denied this with the vehemence of a guilty defendant. ‘And most importantly, he is my cousin.’
‘A very distant one.’
‘Yes,’ said Mimi and stretched her body again. ‘Very distant.’
‘My real name is Miriam,’ she had said to him, and he had replied, not in Yiddish but in French for once, ‘C’est dommage.’
Miriams, he had explained, were as numerous as the sequins on a ball gown, one more, one less, what did it matter? But Mimi, ah, he had only ever met one Mimi before, or rather: not really met, he had only read about her, in a novel, but even then he had thought: that is a very special name, and the person who bears it must be very special too.
‘And he is in love with you!’ When Anne-Kathrin was excited, her voice rose to a squeal. A pigeon flew up in alarm, and the two girls laughed at the silly bird as at that moment they would probably have laughed or cried over anything at all.
They were sitting in the round gazebo that Anne-Kathrin’s father the schoolmaster, who placed great importance on being out in the open, had had built at the end of his garden. To get to it, you had to pass through the whole of the long garden, past all the flowerbeds that were fading away, bare and unused, at this time of year. The schoolmaster had only planted a few onions; he received his potatoes from the council, even though some people wanted to abolish this tribute on the grounds that it was old-fashioned. The flower beds were separated off by a row of rosebushes, and a big branch of an elder bush also obstructed the view. It was precisely because the gazebo was in seemingly such plain view that it was in fact an ideal hiding place.
‘He wants to get hold of the book. He wants to go all the way to Baden, he says, just to find it for me. Even though he hates such journeys, because he had to do so much marching as a soldier.’
Anne-Kathrin brought the ends of her long blonde braids together in front of her nose and squinted slightly. ‘Like a knight’, she said softly, ‘setting off to find a treasure.’ She really wanted to say ‘the Holy Grail’, but she didn’t think that was appropriate in the context of Mimi.
‘And he wants to read it to me. We just have to find a suitable spot for it. Everything’s upside down in our house at the moment, if only Pesach weren’t coming up… My parents, you know.’
Of course Anne-Kathrin offered her friend the gazebo for her rendezvous. The adventures of others, when you have helped to set them up, are almost like your own.
5
‘Mimi was a fille charmante,’ Janki read, translating word for word into Yiddish and sometimes, if the right expression refused to come, simply in French. ‘She was nineteen years old’ — it said ‘twenty-two’ in the book, but as his listener was nineteen, the little change seemed appropriate — ‘small, delicate and self-confident. Her face was like a preliminary sketch for the portrait of an aristocrat, but her features, delicate in their outlines and, it seemed, gently illuminated by the radiance of her clear blue eyes…’
‘Anne-Kathrin has blue eyes,’ thought Mimi, ‘but she isn’t an aristocrat. Certainly not an aristocrat.’
‘… but her features,’ repeated Janki, who had got lost in the novel’s meandering sentences, ‘sometimes showed, when she was tired or in a bad mood, an expression of almost wild brutality.’
‘Brutality?’ thought Mimi, and realised only from Janki’s reaction that she had said it out loud.
‘I haven’t translated it very well. In her it’s something positive. It means “strength” or “power”.’
‘That sounds better,’ thought Mimi.
‘… an expression of almost savage power, in which a physiognomist would probably have recognised the signs of profound egoism or a great lack of feeling. It’s hard to find the correct words,’ he added quickly. ‘It sounds far too crude in Yiddish.’
‘Go on!’ Mimi pleaded and when Janki bent obediently over the book once more she felt something almost like savage brutality within her.
‘Her face bore an unusual charm, her smile young and fresh, and her eyes filled with tenderness and flirtation. The blood of youth flowed warm and fast in her veins and lent her complexion, as white as camellia blossoms, a delicate pink tone.’
‘Camellia blossoms,’ Mimi thought and breathed in deeply. Hanging in the air of Endingen was the stench of the spring slurry that a farmer was spreading in his field. The bench in the gazebo was cobbled together from rough planks, the ground still covered with rotten leaves from the autumn, but Mimi lay stretched out on a sofa in an attic room, a gifted young poet sitting beside her, reading her poems that he had spent long nights writing, just for her.
‘Her hands were so weak, so tiny, so soft on his lips; those childish hands in which Rodolphe had laid his reawakened heart; those snow white hands of Mademoiselle Mimi, who would soon tear his heart in pieces with her rosy fingernails.’ Janki marked the spot with his own fingernail and snapped the book shut.
‘Go on reading! Please!’
Janki shook his head, a gesture that Mimi sensed rather than saw. She had closed her eyes, and the warm spring sun stroked her lids.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Janki. ‘It’s not a book for young girls.’
‘I’m not a child any more!’ said Mimi, but not violently or challengingly as she did in her arguments with her parents, but quietly and with a hint of surprise.
‘It was just because the name reminded me… Mimi.’ She felt as if no one had ever called her by it. ‘But then you’re a Miriam.’
‘Are you absolutely sure of that?’ The kitten stretched its limbs again. ‘If you breathe in deeply,’ Anne-Kathrin had advised her, ‘they look at your breasts.’ Mimi breathed in deeply. It sounded like a groan.
‘Are you in pain?’ asked Janki.
‘Only because you’re treating me like a little girl.’ She hadn’t had to think for a moment for that answer, and was very proud of herself. ‘How does the story go on?’
‘She leaves him.’
‘Oh.’
‘And then she comes back to him. But it’s too late.’
‘Because she’s married to someone else?’
Janki smiled. ‘Marriage… The book is called Scènes de la vie de bohème.’
‘Of course,’ Mimi said quickly, because it had dawned on her that a book deals with fantasy, while a marriage, particularly in Endingen… The shadchen Abraham Singer had been to see her more than once, but every time she had asked Golde to send him away. What did she want with cobblers’ sons and Talmud students? Gap-toothed Pinchas, the son of the shochet Pomeranz, made cow eyes at her every time he met her, and couldn’t say a word. That was why you needed books, because in them everything was different. Because in them the right man was suddenly at the door, and you just had to let him in. ‘Of course,’ she repeated, and felt very wicked. ‘Why should she marry?’
‘She gets involved with men,’ said Janki and looked her firmly in the eyes. ‘Because they give her presents.’
‘In the book?’
‘In the book. But that happens in reality as well. I have known such girls. The seamstresses at Monsieur Delormes… Your parents wouldn’t want me to tell you about it.’
‘My parents aren’t here,’ said Mimi.
‘No,’ replied Janki, ‘your parents aren’t here.’
Salomon Meijer was away again to see to a cow. And Golde — who can count all the things a Jewish housewife has to do, a few days before Pesach? She had to get horseradish for the Seder plate and cover it with soil so that it would stay fresh and hot, she had to attend to the matzos, and she didn’t want, only lekoved Yontev, of course, to appear in the synagogue with the same ribbons on the same dress as last time.