So it was that Désirée sought a new field of activity in Pinchas’s shop. He had only a single employee, one Frau Okun, whom Zalman had once sent him with the request to do something for her. Frau Okun, a young widow, had fled from Russia in dramatic circumstances, and liked to talk in a quavering voice about the persecutions that one had to endure there as a Jew. She was extremely efficient, but treated the customers in a very unfriendly manner. Having grown up in a country where shortages prevailed, she could not be dissuaded from the conviction that customers were basically only supplicants. So there were repeated complaints, and anyone else would have sacked her long ago. Pinchas saw it as a mitzvah to keep her busy, but he was also to some extent happy to use the opportunity to move her from the front to the backroom. So Frau Okun filled bottles up with sweet wine from Palestine in the cellar, pulling the lever of the corking machine with such force that the dull blows could be heard even in the shop. Désirée stood behind the counter wearing a white apron, selling red horseradish coloured with beetroot, or strictly kosher chocolate produced under supervision.
She never mentioned Alfred, which Pinchas, who knew more about the Talmud than he did about psychology, took as a good sign. Alfred’s letters, which Mimi always censored, as she had threatened to do, became duller each time and often contained nothing more than the dutiful greetings one fills the back of postcards with in the summer holidays. ‘You’ll see: the affair will die down,’ Pinchas said optimistically, and Mimi herself already believed that the idea of the cooling-off period and the traineeship in Paris had actually come from her.
They were both mistaken. Désirée, who had to ask permission every single time she went out — very much to the satisfaction of Lea and Rachel, who had to endure the same thing — met Aunt Mina at the tea-room of the Huguenin restaurant once a week. Mimi would have liked to forbid even that; Mina was François’s wife and thus on the side of the enemy. But again Pinchas would hear nothing of it. He felt sorry for Mina. After everything she had had to put up with in her life, now her son had been taken away on top of everything.
The Huguenin was a very respectable place with many Jewish customers. In the summer, when the days were long, one could even sit there on Shabbos afternoon, although of course without money in one’s pocket, which would have been forbidden. One went back on Sunday to pay the previous day’s bill. None the less, the suspicious Mimi checked with a few friends who also went there that it really was Mina there with whom Désirée drank her hot chocolate. One never knew.
There was one thing that her spies didn’t tell her, because they didn’t notice: the two women did more than just talk about Alfred. Mina also brought Désirée his real letters, which he sent to a box at the main Post Office, and which she collected there for her daughter-in-law. Yes, daughter-in-law. Mina, few of whose wishes life had fulfilled, considered Alfred’s baptism as something like her own polio, a misfortune about which the boy could do nothing, and was firmly resolved that it wouldn’t stop him from being happy in exactly the way he wished to be. It was the first time in her life that she wasn’t just an onlooker and a listener, and to her own surprise she enjoyed the conspiracy, a model pupil carrying out all the pranks she had missed in her obedient school days, all at once.
Alfred’s real letters did not consist of empty postcard phrases. They were, if one wished to apply literary standards to them, even quite overblown. He described his life in Paris as nothing but endless waiting; when he went to the museum at the weekend, he saw only Désirée’s face in every portrait, and he asked every cloud that drifted eastwards over the city to carry greetings with it. If one is young, in love and parted, one isn’t very troubled by kitsch.
Désirée read the letters so often that she knew whole passages by heart. She kept the precious pages in the shop, in a drawer full of bonbons that Pinchas had once ordered in large quantities, but which no one wanted to buy. The paper soon assumed a sweetish scent, as if Alfred’s emotional phrases smelled of almonds and rosewater all by themselves. Désirée even took the perfume home with her; in the drawer of her bedside table there was a handful of the sweets, and when she opened the drawer and closed her eyes she felt Alfred quite close to her.
In her diary, which she kept only because she knew very well that Mimi would read it in secret, she wrote, by way of disguise, apparently disappointed sentences like: ‘Alfred seems to cool towards me,’ or reminded herself to work harder on her French conjugations. The conjugation she meant had been in Alfred’s last letter: ‘Je te desire, tu me desires, nous nous désirons.’ Mimi had, without knowing it, given her exactly the right name.
François also kept himself discreetly informed. His business friend was able to tell him about an industrious, serious young man, who showed a great talent for department stores. ‘One can tell all that he has learned from you,’ wrote Monsieur Charpentier. He hoped to be able to do a lot of business with François in future, and was therefore not sparing with his compliments. To François’s regret he could tell him nothing about love affairs, even though, as Monsieur Charpentier flatteringly wrote, Alfred was a very good-looking young man, whose good future one could see at first glance. ‘At this age fidelity doesn’t last long,’ François consoled himself. ‘Something is bound to happen.’
People didn’t come to Pinchas’s shop just for the kosher food; it was also a place where one was bound to meet — and this was at least as important to many of the lady customers — someone who knew the latest gossip from both communities. The stories that appeared in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt on a Friday had already been discussed long ago in the shop, and in fact many articles signed ‘pp’ had only come into being because Pinchas, a freelance worker for the ‘rag’, had kept his ears open while filling bags with flour or sugar. Even the better sort of lady, who liked to send their maids to do the shopping, liked to drop by in person to discuss marriage prospects, exchange sickness reports or just have a good ruddel. Frau Okun, with her brusque, impatient manner, had often spoiled the fun of these cosy chats; Désirée, the ladies were delighted to note, was quite different in this respect. As her thoughts were mostly far away, she was in no hurry to take their money, and didn’t get involved in their conversations, which won her the reputation of being a very sensible and intelligent girl.
Male customers seldom came. Only old bachelors or widowers dropped in every now and again, to buy the meagre portions that they then prepared on their gas cookers at home. Young men attracted attention here, particularly when one of them turned up on a regular basis and seemed not to know what he actually wanted to buy. He hadn’t just happened to be in the neighbourhood, either, the well-informed ladies observed, he worked in a stationery shop on Schaffhauserplatz, and it was a good half-hour’s walk from there to Pinchas’s kosher shop. And besides — the ladies had not only keen eyes, but also good noses — he always arrived smelling of freshly applied eau de Cologne, which was an unambiguous sign in young men. ‘He is interested in Mimi’s daughter,’ the rumour soon circulated, and everyone waited to see when and how the young man would make his first step.