‘Matter?’ Gubser repeated. He stretched the word out in a questioning tone as if he were hearing it for the first time. ‘What sort of matter would the two of us be…?’
‘Chanele says—’
‘Chanele?’ Gubser imitated Salomon’s singsong tone so convincingly that his three sons giggled into their plates. ‘Ah, the young lady who was so kind as to open the door to me. Quite pretty, if it weren’t for those eyebrows.’
‘She says you have something to give me.’
‘She must have misunderstood. Your people are supposed to be better at talking than listening, after all.’ The eldest Gubser son, who was in fact already an adult, laughed out loud, which his mother, without looking up, rewarded with an accurate clip around the ear.
‘Then please forgive me for troubling you.’ Salomon took the hat that he had been holding in his hand all that time and put it back on.
‘Not so fast, not so fast, dear Herr Meijer!’ Gubser wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his coat and got up. ‘Let’s go into the office. The boys don’t need to hear everything.’
The room that Gubser called his office was a cramped room with small windows that barely let in any light, because they were hung all over with tin-framed crests. On the table a paraffin lamp illuminated a muddle of bills and letters, the individual stacks weighed down with slaughtering knives and other butchers’ utensils. On one of the stacks there was a heavy brass ashtray. Gubser — he had to squeeze in between the table and a standing desk with lots of drawers — sat down in a high-backed chair with carved legs, which would have looked more at home in an old castle than in a butcher’s house, and pointed to a matching stool. ‘Please!’
‘I’d sooner stand, if you don’t mind.’
‘I do mind, my dear Herr Meijer. You lot must learn to make yourselves comfortable.’
Salomon sat down. As there was nowhere to put his hat, he hung it over the handle of his umbrella.
‘Yeeesss…’ Gubser leaned back in his chair, and hooked both thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat. ‘A farmer,’ thought Salomon, ‘who has cattle for sale when everyone else has to buy. Someone who looks forward to haggling, because he will always win. He’ll be lighting a cigar next.’
‘You have one!’ said Gubser, holding out the wooden box. ‘Or is that forbidden too?’
‘It is permitted. But I don’t smoke. I take snuff.’
The lighting of the crude cigar was a laborious process. Gubser riffled through a packet of letters, chose one, rolled it firmly together, held it over the lamp and then, puffing away, twirled the cigar around above the burning paper. ‘Yeeesss,’ he said again, when the operation was finally concluded to his satisfaction, ‘then let us try and discover how this misunderstanding came about.’
‘You were at our house this afternoon…’
‘Of course, of course. But even given the politeness for which your people are rightly renowned, I would not have expected you to pay me a return visit the same time.’
‘You sent me a message…’
‘You?’ The butcher grinned like someone approaching the punchline when telling a joke. ‘Herr Meijer!’
Salomon stared at him uncomprehendingly.
‘Or should I say: Monsieur Meijer? What is he? A nephew, a cousin? You can never quite tell with you lot.’
‘Janki?’ A cattle trader only does good business if you can’t see what he’s thinking. At that moment Salomon was a very bad cattle trader.
Gubser laughed loudly and complacently.
‘What do you want from Janki?’
The master butcher narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, produced a series of fat smoke rings and watched them slowly floating apart in the gloom. It was only then that he replied, ‘I don’t know if I’m permitted to tell you this. You wouldn’t be too pleased if other people knew about your business deals.’
Again Salomon gave no sign of his confusion. If someone wants to say something and is still playing coy, you will make him talk sooner with silence than with questions.
‘But on the other hand,’ Gubser said after a pause, ‘you are family. Or — what do you people call it? — mishpocha. All one mishpocha.’
Salomon still said nothing.
‘This Janki is a good man. Still very young, of course, but not stupid. Not stupid at all. He will go far. Above all he has a good nose… That’s not supposed to be a double entendre, my dear Herr Meijer not a double entendre, for heaven’s sake. You know that I would never mock the physical properties of other people. Never. He has a very good nose for the right people. A better one than you, if I can put it as directly as that.’
Salomon looked intently at a crest that showed half a red lily on the left and on the right a yellow field.
‘He came to me and made me a proposal. A rather surprising suggestion, but an illuminating one. That’s right, illuminating. It’s about horses. Horsemeat, to be precise.’
Salomon hid his surprise behind a cough and waved the cigar smoke irritably away.
‘He made you…?’
‘You didn’t want to have me in the business, he told me. I don’t know why, when we have been working together, is this not so, dear Herr Meijer, so long and so well? You could easily have offered me the business with the contracts.’
The auction in Saignélegier, Salomon had known for two days, had taken place. So why was Gubser in such a good mood?
‘How much?’ asked Salomon, and his attempt to show nothing but harmlessly polite interest was not very successful, ‘How much did you buy from him?’
The butcher laughed so loudly that the cigar fell from his mouth, bounced off the bulge in his waistcoat and, spraying a little volcano of ash and ember, landed on one of the piles of papers. ‘Bought?’ he panted. The words bubbled up from his laughter, like gas bubbling from a bog. ‘I didn’t buy!’
It turned out that Janki, after meeting Gubser, had visited him in his shop later the same day and made the same proposal that Salomon had so vehemently rejected: selling horsemeat on contract and then, after the price drop that might be expected, stocking up again much more cheaply. He didn’t yet have any contacts here, he had explained, so he needed a partner familiar with the branch. He was prepared to put some of his money at risk, and he had brought his capital with him — ‘knotted in a handkerchief, as gypsies do’. He had wanted to go fifty-fifty, but Gubser — ‘We’ve learned Jewish ways from you’ — had bargained him down to seventy-thirty; in the end he, the butcher, had had to do all the work. ‘And earned the wrath of my colleagues.’ It hadn’t been hard to find takers, and even easier for Gubser than it would have been for Salomon. He had claimed that he had speculated with his purchases, and now that temperatures had suddenly become so mild, the ice he needed for refrigeration was costing him a fortune. He had sold a lot, and impressed on each buyer that he was to discuss it with no one. ‘And they won’t, now that they’ve fallen for it. No one will want to look a fool in front of the others.’
He had wanted to bring his share of the profits, calculated cleanly, or, as Gubser put it, in a correct and Christian manner, to Janki today, and he was sorry, terribly sorry, that he had caused this stupid misunderstanding and startled Salomon like that. ‘You probably didn’t even come for dinner. Can’t I offer you something anyway? Really not?’
But perhaps, said Gubser, and looked for the next letter to relight his extinguished cigar, perhaps dear Herr Meijer would be kind enough to take the money to his nephew, or whatever the relationship between the two of them was, it was ready here in the office, and a decent businessman, strange as it might seem to Herr Meijer, didn’t sleep easily when they hadn’t paid their debts.