‘Practice makes perfect, you mean.’
Yes, you could put it that way.
‘And you watch them?’
No, of course not. Désirée was discreet, and left the two of them alone. She preferred to go back around the corner and warn the lovers if a walker was approaching. She had developed a special whistle, like the one used on Shabbos when you’re not allowed to use the doorbell. No, she didn’t watch them kissing, she certainly didn’t, what was Mama thinking of, but Esther was her best friend, and had told her exactly what it was like when one…
‘And? What is it like?’
Wonderful, Esther had said, it wonderful. You came so close to one another, and at that moment you knew that you belonged together, ‘I don’t think you can kiss a man if you don’t love him.’ Because you also tasted and smelled, and there’s that expression, ‘someone not being to your taste’, and if someone wasn’t to your taste, Désirée assumed, then you couldn’t kiss him either. Yes, and then there was a funny story to telclass="underline" the young man, Esther’s friend, always sucked peppermint pastilles before they met, ‘isn’t that very funny, Mama?’
Mimi didn’t laugh.
‘So the two of them know that they belong together?’
Désirée was quite sure of that. She had seen the two of them often enough, and they complimented each other as well as… as… ‘As well as you and Papa. I’m sure you knew from the beginning as well…’
Not quite from the beginning, thought Mimi.
And they would overcome all obstacles, Esther had said. Even if their families were firmly opposed to the idea, nothing could ever tear them apart.
‘Why should their families be opposed?’
‘Beause he…’
‘Yes?’
But Désirée had promised her friend not to tell, or else she might as well tell Mimi the name straight away. And she had already told her far too much.
‘Non, ma petite,’ said Mimi, and her voice had suddenly shed all its migraine and weakness. ‘You’ve talked quite enough already.’
And then she talked about a delivery of English gentlemen’s boots — she said ‘gentlemen’s boots’ in the same frighteningly friendly tone in which she had said ‘whale jawbone’ not so long ago — a surprise delivery that had had to be cleared away immediately, first work, then pleasure, which was why Esther Weill had stayed at home for the whole afternoon, without a rendezvous, and without a walk and hand-holding and kissing. And now Mimi wanted to know, she wanted to know right now, who had met whom by the deer enclosure, who had kissed whom, and who the man was, this strange man whose name she was not allowed to know because the families would be opposed. ‘No more lies!’
Désirée’s resistance held out for only a few minutes.
She had always been an obedient daughter; even as a baby, if you believed the stories, she had cried less than others. Mimi had waited for a child for two decades, and had — she had so much to catch up on — been resolved from the first day to be a perfect mother. She shielded and protected Désirée so zealously that Pinchas had said to her more than once that even falling over was something that such a child needed to learn. Even later, when Hinda’s children, who were of a quite different temperament, turned the whole flat upside down, Désirée showed so little interest in pranks and adventures that Lea and Rachel derisorily called her ‘Mammatitti’. She had never learned to stand up to her mother, and if she tried to, a reference to the tortures that Mimi had suffered during her labour was quite enough to make her give up again straight away. All the lies of the past few months had only been possible because she had been telling the truth the whole time, she hadn’t invented anything, she had just given her experiences a different name, had said ‘Esther’ when she meant ‘I’, and had been happy somehow to be able to confide her secret in her mother in this way.
She tried silence, pressed her eyes firmly shut the way little children do when they want to make something threatening disappear, and couldn’t keep the tears from flowing down her face.
‘Don’t ask me, Mama, please don’t ask me,’ she said again and again, but Mimi was more furious than Désirée had ever seen her, not so much with her daughter, even though she had told her monstrous lies, but much more with herself for allowing herself to be lied to, for having been blind and stupid, for having played along like an idiot, for giving good advice, for being led around by the nose. There could never be forgiveness for it, not for her and not for Désirée either.
At last she gave in.
Yes, it had been her, she herself, Désirée sobbed, it had been her the whole time, but she hadn’t been able to say so, because it would have been forbidden her, and she wouldn’t have survived that, no, she would rather have jumped from a bridge than give this man up. ‘You don’t know what it’s like when you love someone, Mama, you can’t know, or you wouldn’t look at me like that. But it’s my life and not yours, and I’m not going to let anybody break it.’
‘Who is the man?’ asked Mimi.
Désirée swore that she would never give it away, never in her life, and yet she knew that she didn’t have the strength to resist her mother.
‘Is it a goy?’ asked Mimi.
Désirée nodded and said at the same time: ‘No, no, he’s not a goy,’ but he was one and he wasn’t one, and now everything was broken, destroyed for all time.
‘What’s his name?’ asked Mimi.
Désirée cried and pleaded and then said the name after all.
Mimi locked her daughter in her room and set off for François’s house. If someone had himself geshmat and made himself unhappy for the rest of his life, that was his affair. But if his son, this goy Alfred, wanted to destroy Désirée’s life as well, that was something quite different. Something for which she would never, ever forgive him.
47
The whole flat smelled of the cheesecake — Mother Pomeranz’s old recipe — that Hinda normally only baked on Shavuot. She hadn’t let them take that away from her, although Zalman shook his head disapprovingly and said, ‘They’re not coming for coffee.’
‘Still,’ Hinda said and fetched the yontevdik tablecloth out of the cupboard. It was so heavily starched that its folds cracked slightly when it was laid out. ‘The whole family is meeting at our house! Do you want them to think they’re at a poor person’s house?’
If it had been up to Zalman, they could have sat at the empty table, with a glass of water in each place and nothing else. He had taken part in lots of negotiations as a trade unionist, and it was his experience, he said, that one reached an agreement more quickly if the circumstances were niggardly. ‘You think better on an empty stomach.’
‘You’re more peaceful with a full stomach,’ Hinda replied and of course she was right again.
Lea and Rachel were unusually helpful out of pure curiosity and, as on Seder evening, they carried in chairs from all the rooms.
‘Too many,’ said Zalman. ‘There are only nine of us. Janki and Chanele aren’t coming.’
‘There are still eleven of us,’ Lea contradicted him and started counting: ‘Three Meijers, Uncle Arthur makes four, three Pomeranzes makes seven and four Kamionkers…’
‘Two Kamionkers,’ Zalman corrected her. ‘You’re going to stay in your room. This is nothing for children.’
Lea protested, as outraged as one can only be outraged at the age of eighteen to be described in those terms, and Rachel, who out of sheer high spirits often talked more quickly than she wished she had in retrospect, tried to support her sister. ‘If we aren’t allowed to then how come Désirée…?’ And wished she could have swallowed the sentence straight away.