So he whispered, ‘What sort of house is that, in fact, on Fortunagasse?’
‘It’s full of people who want exactly what your friends are demanding so noisily: to get out of Switzerland as quickly as possible.’
‘To Poland?’
‘Much further East.’
‘So why did they even…?’
He fell silent, because Lampertz was coming closer. Normally Lampertz was more of a ramrod-straight marcher, but now he strolled over in an exaggeratedly relaxed manner, to stress that it was really, really just by chance that he had happened to drop in here at the Strickhof on his day off.
‘Do you think the paint’s all right like that, or does it need another coat?’ asked Hillel.
‘Two at least. No bodging here.’ He stood beside them for a moment and then said, ‘Did you actually drive down those steps with a team of horses?’
‘I’m sorry, Herr Lampertz.’
‘And rightly so. But I’d have to say: well done! I wouldn’t have thought you capable of it. Not even you would have managed that one, Böhni.’
57
Zalman Kamionker had come to his clothes factory like the Virgin to the Child or, to use his own simile, like the patriarch Abraham to his son Isaac, at an age when such a change in his life was no longer to be expected. His work with the Relief Committee for refugees from Galicia had forced him to become a labour broker, which had at first, during the Great War, not been a very difficult job for an experienced negotiator. Active service and the border watch meant that there was a universal shortage of manpower, and anyone who was willing to put in a bit of elbow grease was welcome. Over time, the committee gradually started falling asleep. It only became active occasionally, when there was acute emergency, and took account of its meagre holdings once a year, a task that Frau Okun was more than capable of doing all on her own. Then, in the economic crisis of the early 1930s, unemployment started rising faster and faster, and the committee had to be reactivated. The crisis was a particularly serious blow to the Eastern Jews, whose origins could still clearly be heard and who, to be honest, were not held in particularly great esteem by Swiss Jews of long standing. These refugees, who had in fact become relatively well acclimatised in Switzerland, had suddenly reverted to being foreign scoundrels, who were overrunning the country and taking away the few remaining jobs. When people were fired, they were the first to go, and then who did they go to with their problems? To Zalman, of course, and he didn’t send them away, even though Hinda observed tartly that his readiness to help others had also cost him his own parnassah. He approached all kinds of people for work, and because there was none to be found, he decided to create some.
As he had once done in his time in the Golden Medina, he did the rounds of the department stores and offered to supply the buyers with off-the-peg clothes, exactly according to their wishes and cheaper than any other suppliers. He just wanted to create a bit of employment at a time when people were already standing on street corners holding cardboard signs, hawking themselves around as a shmattes dealer would hawk an old pair of trousers. If someone had told him it would make him the balebos of his own company, he would have told them he was meshuga. Zalman Kamionker as a capitalist? You might as soon have had Joseph Goebbels as a minyan man.
The first order came from François, whose department store had run out of warm coats after a sudden cold spell in the spring. The order, François made a point of stressing, had nothing at all to do with charity, what would someone baptised be doing supporting Jewish refugees? He was a businessman, and in business neither Jewish charity nor Christian love of one’s fellow man had any place. If the coats delivered were not the very best quality, Zalman was never to show his face there again, was that clear? But he did place the order.
That was how it began.
In the first year he employed people as the work came in, by the day or even by the hour. They each worked at home, practically operating the sewing machine with one foot and rocking the cradle with the other. As they were all sewing for dear life, the working day could sometimes last fourteen hours or even more. Zalman often felt like an exploiter, Zalman of all people, the trade unionist who had been foremost in fighting for a forty-eight hour week in the 1918 General Strike, and who had, of course, therefore promptly lost his job. At first they delivered only coats — Zalman was very well acquainted with those from his time in America — and they were later joined by dresses and dressing gowns, and soon the KK monogram appeared on every item of monogrammed clothing. KK was actually supposed to stand for Konfektion Kamionker — Konfektion meaning ‘ready-made’ — but the workers had their own understanding of the letters. For them KK meant, quite simply: Koschere Kleiderfabrik — kosher clothes factory.
Strangely enough, the final breakthrough came via the customs of a continent far away. A German refugee, the former owner of a fashion shop in Magdeburg, had by chance been given a visa to move to Kenya, where there was an apparently limitless need for cotton clothes of size 50 and up, with brightly coloured polka-dot fabrics most in demand. When, because of bureaucratic difficulties, the man was stuck in Zurich for a few weeks before travelling back to Kenya, Zalman’s committee had supported him — it had stopped restricting its charity only to Galicians long ago — and out of gratitude he now remembered the kosher clothes factory. There were more and more repeat orders, which enabled KK to rent its own business properties in Wollishofen, and take on its first permanent staff.
At first Zalman didn’t work for the company himself, or else did his work unpaid. Even though he regularly fought with his employers, he had always managed to find a job, and he wouldn’t have thought of taking someone else’s job away from him. But the more successful the business became, the harder it was to run it casually and just as an act of kindness, and eventually Zalman had had to come to terms with the fact that he was now the company director whether he liked it or not. To remain true to his principles in at least one respect, at first he wanted to pay himself no more than he paid one of his cutters, but then Hinda, who never normally got involved in his job, had made a terrible fuss. Did he really think he would get a better seat in Gan Eden, she demanded to know, if he was satisfied with seventy rappen an hour, and would he please explain to her how such starvation wages were to pay for the suits and the good shirts that his new role would demand of him. That was almost the worst thing for Zalman: he would now have to put on a tie every day, because he would be dealing with customers all the time. He was a peaceful man, but it made him furious every time.
The argument that convinced him in the end was the fact that Rachel was working in the factory as well. There was no possible reason why Zalman, who worked his back off for the company around the clock should not earn more than his daughter, who as office manager did nothing but sit on her tochus and order people around.
Meanwhile he had got quite used to being the Herr Direktor. The kosher clothes factory was a recognised business, they worked on Deutschland brand central bobbin sewing machines, and used electric irons with regulating switches. But what was much more important: they provided work for almost thirty people. The staff register included a ‘directrice’ for the designs, fourteen stitchers, six cutters, four ironers, three people in the office, an apprentice, a travelling salesman and their own model. Only two employees were not Jewish: the directrice, one Fräulein Bodmer, who visited all the fashion shows so that their designs very quickly followed current trends, and the mannequin, a tearful peroxide blonde called Blandine Flückiger, who set a great deal of store by her sensitive soul and had to be consoled almost every day over some slight or other.