Rachel, who ruled the office with an iron hand, regularly argued with her, just as she had argued with her two predecessors. She was not at all happy with the idea of a silly trollop of just twenty-four being sweet-talked by all the men just because she had a cute punim and was a size 38. And besides, Rachel was almost sure of it, there was something going on between Blandine and Joni Leibowitz, the travelling salesman. By now the KK’s clientele stretched as far as St Gallen, Bern and Basle, and everywhere the buyers wanted to have the new designs presented on the living model. Joni Leibowitz and she often travelled alone together in the car, and everybody knew what models were like.
The deeper reason for her animosity lay in the fact that Rachel, so many years ago that it wasn’t true, had herself once taken an interest in Joni Leibowitz. Back in the war, and before he drank himself a little petit-bourgeois belly, he had been a handsome man in his uniform, a stationery representative by profession; only later had he switched to the shmattes profession. In those days he had in fact danced attendance to Désirée, but because no one had had a sensible word out of her since Alfred’s death, he slowly lost interest in her and her grocer’s shop and started looking elsewhere. Rachel and he had gone dancing together a few times, and once — God knows, one had been young and stupid — she had let him kiss her, and he had immediately tried to put his hand under her blouse. Which she hadn’t let him do, she hadn’t been as young and stupid as that even when she was in nappies.
With each year that she herself remained single, Rachel found more and more fault in married and attractive women.
She herself had nothing more exciting to do than go to the office every day, which was why she claimed to do it entirely out of conviction. ‘We live in the twentieth century; there’s no room for fashion plates and old biddies.’ She still had her flaming red hair, even though she had to touch it up discreetly with henna every month, and still wore the smartest dresses from the KK collection, ‘not out of vanity, as a working woman such a thing would be completely alien to me, but because in the end I have to represent the company.’ When visitors came into the shop, this representation assumed two completely different forms. She received buyers with a kind of tomboyish chumminess, and preceded each sentence with the unspoken introduction: ‘Among us business people…’ Towards job-seekers and other supplicants she was off-puttingly severe, although this was a bitter necessity. Zalman in his generosity was something of a pushover, and often she had had to say to him, ‘If it was up to you, we’d employ every shnorrer who walked in off the street, and the company would be mechullah in a year.’
The man who was standing in front of her was just such a one. She didn’t like his manner. He had studied her keenly for a moment, she sensed something like that, and now he was making an uninterested face as if it wasn’t worth looking at her any more closely. Stood there as if rooted to the spot, hat in hand, and didn’t move even when she kept him waiting and then took a phone call and then another. Not once did he so much as shift the weight of his body from one foot to the other. This was someone who had learned to wait, one of those patient people who are particularly annoying because you can’t get rid of them again so easily.
‘And you want…?’ Rachel had to ask at last.
‘Work.’
He said it as one delivers a military report, not one syllable too many or too few. He was a German, ‘a Berliner’, thought Rachel, who didn’t know much about dialects, but for whom everything that sounded unpleasantly Teutonic came from Berlin. His voice was surprisingly loud. Usually if people wanted something they were rather timid. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ the tone of their voice meant, ‘but if it isn’t too much trouble, I have something to ask you for.’
He wasn’t someone who asked. If he bothered someone, than he bothered them.
‘Are you a tailor?’ asked Rachel, although of course she knew he wasn’t. You could see that. His suit was cut for a much fatter man, and really hung off him; an expert, if he had had to make do with cast-off clothes, would have made it much smaller, so that it fit.
‘If a tailor is what you need, then I’m a tailor,’ said the man.
‘Can you sew?’
‘I can learn.’
‘Like that? From one day to the next?’
‘If necessary, yes.’
‘How hard do you imagine it is?’
‘There are harder things.’
‘Listen,’ said Rachel, and because the man was so much bigger than she was and she didn’t want to do the koved for him, to stand up, she bobbed up and down on her office chair. ‘We don’t take on untrained staff here.’
He laughed. No, he didn’t laugh. He produced a noise that could have been a laugh if a laugh could be pickled, stored in the cellar and eventually, if there was nothing else in the house, taken back out again.
‘Believe me, Fräulein,’ he said. ‘I can do anything anyone asks of me. I’m a skilled practitioner.’
Rachel didn’t like being called ‘Fräulein’. She always suspected concealed mockery behind the word, along the lines of: ‘Soon be forty, and still no husband.’
The visitor was hard to guess. He could be fifty. Or less. Not that she was interested.
‘What do you actually expect me to do for you?’
‘You could ask my name,’ said the man. ‘I’m called Grün.’
‘Grün and what else?’
‘Grünberg, Grünfeld, Grünbaum. Pick one.’
‘Excuse me?’
There was nothing unusual about him, apart from his oversized suit. No one would have thrown him out of a Jewish simcha; with a face like that he would have been mishpocha in any house. And there were crow’s feet around his eyes, even if Rachel hadn’t yet seen him smiling yet. Nothing unusual.
The craziest people always look the most normal, she had read somewhere.
‘In fact, Herr Grün, I just wanted to know your first name.’
‘Felix,’ said the man. ‘Isn’t that a good joke?’
‘What’s so funny about it?’
‘Felix means “happy”.’
She couldn’t make him out at all, and that alone made her dislike him. Either a person can sew or they can’t; you don’t just turn up hat in hand and get a job straight away.
‘I’m sorry, Herr Grün, but…’
‘You aren’t sorry,’ the man said without a hint of reproach. ‘You even enjoy it. Not much, but you do. I’m familiar with this. Maybe I’d be exactly the same if I had power over other people.’
‘Why power?’
‘You have work, I need work.’
‘You’re not a tailor.’
‘I can pretend to be one. Remarkably realistic. Like your hair.’
The cheek.
‘What about my hair?’
‘You should mix a little black coffee in with the paste, then the henna won’t be so bright. I know that from a work colleague.’
‘And what sort of work is that supposed to be? Know-all?’ This man was making her simply furious.
‘She was in the same field as me,’ said Herr Grün. ‘When I still had a job. Well, yes’ — he sighed, and the sigh came from the cellar, from some pickling jar where his feelings were stored — ‘well, yes, tailor isn’t the worst thing in the world. If you like I can start straight away.’