Chanele was alone at home when the master butcher Gubser appeared at the door, and at first she didn’t even hear his knocking. She had gone up to the attic to bring down the first box of Pesach crockery, and in passing — if she didn’t attend to it, who would? — it had occurred to her that the little room needed to be cleaned and aired again. It was a matter of urgency, too. If you pressed your cheek firmly onto the pillow, you could distinctly smell Janki’s male smells, of smoke and sweat and very slightly of cinnamon.
The room had been tidied, but the yellow neckerchief with the knotted coins was nowhere to be seen. ‘He must have found a hiding-place for it,’ thought Chanele, and felt hurt, only for a moment, by such mistrust. The foreign uniform hung stock-straight from a hanger as if still standing to attention. Although Chanele had brushed it out and aired it outside for several nights, a smell still clung to it, probably the smell of war: hay, gunpowder and tobacco. If you closed your eyes…
But Gubser was hammering more violently at the door now, with the heavy stick he always carried to drive on reluctant cattle, and which, if he met one of his good customers in the street, he liked to present as a rifle.
He didn’t present arms to Chanele, he just gave a half-bow, impossible to tell whether it was meant politely or as an ironic insult and asked, ‘Is Herr Meijer not at home?’
‘They’re all out and about.’
‘I should have guessed. Busy people. Always busy. Like ants.’
‘Can I give him a message?’
‘That would be charming of you, lovely Fräulein, charming. I am most indebted to you.’ Gubser placed his hand on his chest, where something bulged over his heart, probably his money bag. ‘Tell him he is a clever man. What they say is quite correct: if a Christian is clever, he’s prudent, if a Jew is clever, he’s cunning. Tell him it worked.’
‘Shall I also tell him what worked?’
‘He’ll probably know that himself, won’t he? Perhaps he doesn’t want everyone to find out. Discretion is what they call it. Discretion. He is an intelligent man. Tell him to call in on me. I have something for him.’
‘What?’
But Gubser only shook his head, bobbed again in a half-bow and was already walking down the street. Before he turned the corner into Badweg, he gave a little skip, as if on the dance floor.
His path led him past the schoolhouse, where he saw Anne-Kathrin, that blonde with the heavy braids, sitting bent over a piece of embroidery in the bay of the schoolmaster’s house. It was a picturesque, very Swiss picture, and Gubser could not know that Anne-Kathrin had neither the patience nor the skilful fingers for such work, and had never finished a piece of embroidery in her whole life. She was only using a pretext to keep watch inconspicuously for her father, who had gone off once again for one of his healthy outings into the open countryside, at a marching pace and with his walking stick over his shoulder. If he came back earlier than expected, she had arranged with Mimi, Anne-Kathrin would immediately run to her own room, which opened out onto the garden and, at the open window, knock out the heavy winter clothes which, now that it was getting warmer, had to be packed up and locked away safe from the moths. The carpet beater, and they had tried it out, made a satisfactorily loud noise that could be clearly heard in the gazebo.
Just behind the gazebo there ran a hedge in which Anne-Kathrin had, while still a schoolgirl, discovered a gap, which she had for various reasons repeatedly extended. You could force your way through there, to a narrow path that led to the river, and if you didn’t forget to dab off telltale burrs from your dress, no one could guess how you’d got there.
Janki had flicked on through the book and was now translating a passage in which Rodolphe’s enthusiastic eloquence ‘by turns tender, stirring and melancholy’ gradually won his Mimi over to him. ‘She felt’, Janki read, ‘the ice of apathy that had for so long kept her heart unfeeling, melting from his love. Then she threw herself at his chest and told him with kisses what she couldn’t say with words.’ He fell silent, and Mimi, whose head, she didn’t know how, had leant against his shoulder, made an impatient mewling noise.
‘L’aurore — how do you say aurore?’ asked Janki.
‘Sunrise,’ Mimi replied, and had to repeat the word several times. ‘Sunrise.’
‘Sunrise surprised them in a close embrace, eye to eye, hand in hand, and their moist, ardent lips…’
It had, Mimi later said to Anne-Kathrin, really just been a fly, a fly far too early for the season, that had landed on her nose and startled her, just a desire to get rid of it and shake it off and if her lips had touched Janki’s mouth for a moment, had brushed against it only for a fragment of a second, it hadn’t been intentional, certainement pas and he had, unlike a young man from the village would have done, reacted like a cavalier, which is to say not at all, he had acted as if he hadn’t noticed anything, as if nothing at all had happened, and in truth nothing had happened, said Mimi to Anne-Kathrin, nothing at all, they had read a book together, that must surely be allowed, although her mother was always telling her off for her love of literature; if it was up to her, you were just supposed to waste away as a young girl.
Anne-Kathrin agreed and asked her to give a very detailed account of what hadn’t happened, how Mimi had said ‘Pardon!’ quite calmly and coolly, as you do when you accidentally get too close to someone in the market, how Janki had only nodded, but how his eyes, those big, expressive eyes, had looked at Mimi — ‘like when someone’s thirsty, you understand?’ — and Anne-Kathrin understood very well and wanted to hear the whole story all over again, just to be able to confirm to Mimi that it hadn’t been a kiss, very definitely not a kiss.
Janki didn’t read the sentence he had begun all the way to the end. He even left the book in the gazebo, and Anne-Kathrin later had to hide it under the pillow in her room. On the way home he walked beside Mimi like a stranger, a cousin beside a cousin that he doesn’t know any more than that. For a moment Golde had the impression they had had an argument, but she forgot the thought again straight away, because she was much more preoccupied with another matter: master butcher Gubser urgently wanted to talk to Salomon, and Salomon had no idea what it might be about.
When Salomon arrived at Gubser’s house, the butcher was still at dinner. His wife, an angular person who had developed a mechanical precision in her movements from cutting sausages and weighing slices, opened the door to the dining room for him, where Gubser and three red-faced sons were bent over their plates. All four looked up only briefly, as they would have looked up briefly from their hymn books if someone had tried to push their way along the pew. Gubser was first to finish his dinner, wiped up the sauce with a piece of bread and then said, still chewing, ‘Ah, Herr Meijer! What a delightful surprise! Can I offer you something? A slice of ham, perhaps?’
‘You wanted to talk to me, I’ve been told.’
‘I did? I can’t remember. But please sit down, my dear, dear Herr Meijer. Are you sure you won’t do us the honour of having a little something? No? But you will have a drop of wine. Erika, a glass for our guest!’
They weren’t playing the game for the first time. Master butcher Gubser knew very well that Salomon Meijer wasn’t permitted to eat anything or drink wine at his house, and his digs had no more meaning than the compliments that he added to the shopping of his lady customers like free soup-bones.
‘I don’t want to keep you for long,’ said Salomon. ‘I only came because I was told it was an urgent matter.’