Gubser stood up and pushed his way past the edge of the table. He pulled open one drawer of the standing desk after the other while waving his other hand apologetically behind his back, which was probably supposed to mean: ‘You must forgive a person who is involved in as many business deals as I am, if he can’t remember every single insignificant detail all at once.’ Bending lower he stretched his bottom out towards Salomon. The beginning of a wide, red-and-white striped pair of braces peeped out from below his waistcoat.
‘Oh, that’s it!’ he said at last, in a voice that reinforced Salomon in his conviction that all this searching was a piece of theatre that he was staging for some unfathomable reason. Gubser straightened with a groan — he groan didn’t sound convincing either — and held out a packet wrapped in wax paper to Salomon, with both hands, as if it was too heavy to carry it otherwise. The packet was tied tightly and the knot reinforced with a lump of sealing wax, so thick that it would have been enough for ten letters.
‘Here!’ A good deal for your relative. We could have done the same thing, just you and me. We wouldn’t have needed him at all. I might even have given you forty per cent rather than only thirty. But you wouldn’t have had sufficient trust in me. A poor knowledge of human nature, Herr Meijer. A very poor knowledge of human nature.’
When Salomon handed the packet to Janki, he didn’t react. He went up to his attic room to check the contents, came back down as if nothing particular had happened, and didn’t even want to notice the curious faces of the others. He sat down with them at the table, ate herring and potatoes, drank tea, passed the bread when asked to do so, and it was only sometimes — although perhaps Mimi was imagining it — that he didn’t immediately notice when someone had asked him a question, and in order to reply he had to bring himself back from somewhere. ‘It must have something to do with the book he was reading to me from,’ she thought.
Golde held her knife and fork in her hands, two strange pieces of equipment whose purpose she couldn’t quite explain to herself, sucked her lower lip deep into her mouth and was chewing around on it. ‘There’s something different about him,’ she thought. ‘If he was my own son, would I know what it was?’
‘He’s a man and not a boy,’ Chanele thought and remembered the smell of the uniform.
‘I shouldn’t have taken him in,’ thought Salomon.
Janki pushed his plate away from him and suddenly smiled. ‘Is our neighbour Oggenfuss actually a good tailor?’ he asked. ‘I think I’ll have a new pair of trousers made for Pesach.’
6
Three months later Janki had a shop.
He didn’t set it up in peasant Endingen, where the Jews lived, as they did in Lengnau, not because the air was so healthy there, but because they hadn’t been granted permission to live anywhere else in the Confederation, no, Janki set up his shop in Baden, which wasn’t exactly Paris either, it wasn’t even Colmar, but it wasn’t a village, it was a small town whose inhabitants were interested in things other than the milk yields of their cows and the harvest from their fields.
The cellar, which in everyone’s opinion he had rented at too high a price — ‘I could get five byres for the same money!’ said Salomon — wasn’t very spacious. What Janki called ‘just right for an exclusive clientele’ was in Salomon’s words as cramped as shul on Yom Kippur, when everyone forces their way in to clear their debts with God. You might serve perhaps two or three customers in there in elegant intimacy, but it was already getting too cramped for a fourth, and a fifth, if there ever was one, would have to wait pressed against the wall until room came free at the counter. Of course, Janki would have had more surface area for his money in a less prominent situation, but the Vordere Metzggasse, situated between the Weite and the Mittlere Gasse, was the precise spot that he wanted. ‘If you want to impress people,’ he said, ‘you have to be on the Rue de Rivoli and not in some faubourg or other,’ an opinion with which Mimi keenly concurred, even though she knew neither where the Rue de Rivoli was, nor what a faubourg might be. Salomon refused to be convinced, and insisted that where he was concerned, he wouldn’t pay a higher price for a cow ‘just because it shits on gilded straw’. Nonetheless, even if he would never have admitted it, he was starting to like Janki. There weren’t many people who knew what they wanted.
One further disadvantage of Janki’s new shop was the fact that both spaces had served as a grocer’s store-room, and more particularly for his spices. Janki did engage a painter, and even had him come for a second time for good money, but the heavy aroma of ginger, cardamom and nutmeg resisted all attempts to dispel it, dug its way into cracks and crannies from which, particularly on hot days, it crept unsuspected and settled especially in the doors that Jani had fitted over his fabric shelves, so that he could dramatically display his goods by parting the curtains. Even decades later the smell of gingerbread and ginger nuts still reminded many of the residents of Baden of being led by their mother’s hand to Frenchman Meijer’s shop.
Janki also, after a detailed consultation with Red Moische, had the same painter who had painted the walls make a store sign, French Drapery Jean Meijer. As he had little room at his disposal on his narrow part of the façade, the letters were not as big as Janki would have wished, and for the same reason he did not take Moische’s advice to leave a little space on the right so that he could later add the words and Sons. But there was one thing that Janki did not want on any account to do without: a coat of arms decorated with a little crown, like the ones that court suppliers had on their signs. As a sign for his coat of arms he ordered an orb, the result of which, dashed off unlovingly by the artist, looked more like an etrog, the citrus fruit needed for the rituals of the Feast of Tabernacles.
Even though the grocer would have let him have his own at a good price, Janki had a new counter made, wide enough for him to roll out a length of fabric on it. When the counter arrived, he locked himself in for a whole day and repeatedly practised a gesture that he had admired in Monsieur Delormes; he had had the knack of swirling the massive wooden pole the bale was rolled around through the air without any apparent effort, until the fabric assumed its own weightless life and floated towards the customer with metropolitan elegance. ‘You must feel the dress just by looking at the fabric,’ Monsieur Delormes had always said.
Janki had his first fabrics brought from Paris. As the cost of the shop’s conversion had exceeded his budget, and he had to request a loan as an unknown businessman, there was so little that the doors over the shelves served to hide the gaps rather than present the goods on offer. The selection could have been much bigger had Janki not insisted on having only the choicest materials on offer but, Mimi explained to her hopelessly old-fashioned father, ‘If you want to have the best customers, you must offer the best goods.’ Along with the order, Janki had sent a letter to be passed on to Monsieur Delormes, in the hope that the famous man might give him a letter of recommendation which, printed in the Badener Tagblatt, would certainly make a big impression on the public. So far no answer had arrived, so that Janki had to settle for advertisements and notices, which he signed, ‘Jean Meijer, formerly of the most important fashion houses in Paris’.
In spite of his new status as boss of his own company, Janki still lived in his attic room in Endingen. Golde wouldn’t have allowed anything else, and with all the expenditure required by the shop, a flat of his own would really have been a needless waste of money. Every morning before six o’clock, without breakfast and with only a piece of bread in his pocket, he walked the two-hour journey to Baden; he had learned how to march, after all, and it was also, he explained, much easier, ‘when you know that what awaits you at your destination is not a battle, but at worst a skirmish with a painter or a cabinet maker’.