On the long-awaited day of the opening he wanted to set off as early as possible, but he was held back by Mimi, who was normally extremely reluctant to leave her warm bed. She couldn’t have got up early today either, because her hair still fell unkempt over the shoulders of her dove-grey dressing gown. That disorderly frame gave her face a wild, gypsy quality, an expression that suited her very well, as she had established at the mirror. Not without a certain embarrassment she held a present out to Janki, a money bag of soft, red Morocco leather, which she herself had embroidered with the letters J M. A little crown, like the ones on the signs of the court suppliers, hovered over the monogram. As she handed it over, their hands touched, and inside the money bag — was Janki trembling, or was it Mimi? — a coin moved. ‘It’s only a lucky rappen,’ Mimi said quickly, ‘so that you do good business and it is never empty.’
‘Thank you. Merci. But now I should really…’ The sentence lay there, a clock that nobody had remembered to wind.
‘Yes,’ said Mimi. ‘You should.’ Her lips were suddenly dry, and she had to run her tongue over them.
‘I should be on time today of all days,’ said Janki, and still didn’t move.
‘Today of all days,’ said Mimi.
‘The money bag is beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ said Mimi, ‘it certainly is.’
‘What does JM stand for?’
Mimi didn’t understand him. ‘Janki Meijer, of course.’
‘Shame,’ said Janki.
Only Anne-Kathrin, to whom Mimi reported the conversation word-for-word that same morning, could find an explanation for that strange reaction, an explanation so illuminating that Mimi burst into tears and repeated several times in a tone of self-reproach that she was a cow, a silly cow, and if Janki now thought she was a beef cow that you had to lead by a ring through its nose before it noticed where it was going, if he despised her now as a village clod, then she had only herself to blame. Not that she wanted anything from Janki, certainement pas, she wouldn’t even think of it, but that she had not previously thought about the many ways in which such a monogram could be read, that she could not forgive herself, not if she lived to a hundred and twenty.
J M: Janki and Mimi.
So Janki said ‘Shame’, without guessing at the whirlwind of truly Talmudic interpretations those two syllables could produce. That Mimi did not immediately understand him certainly had something to do with the fact that at that precise moment Chanele arrived, she too bringing a present to celebrate the opening of Janki’s business: a little bundle wrapped shapelessly in a cloth, which she pressed into his hand with an almost reproachful ‘There, for you!’ as one eventually, and reluctantly, yields to a child’s endless pleading. Neither did she wait to see if he would unwrap it on the spot, but disappeared into the kitchen, where she was heard clattering pots and pans around as if they’d done something to her.
Janki shrugged, put the little bundle in the pocket of his coat and set off. Although Mimi stood behind the door for a long time, apparently completely fascinated by a sparrow taking its morning bath in the dust of the street, he didn’t turn round.
‘Why did you have to get involved?’
‘Involved in what?’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
No proper friendship, or even a sisterly feeling, had ever arisen between Mimi and Chanele, contrary to what Salomon had hoped, when he had so unexpectedly brought home a second baby. If Chanele was to replace Mimi’s stillborn brother, the plan was a failure; Mimi had, from the very start, resisted her rival, yelling herself sick and hoarse, had tried to peck her away as an old rooster would peck away a young one, had clung weeping to Golde for hours, and later, when she grew older, probably rubbed onions in her eyes to make the tears to which she seemed to lay claim visible for all the world. As Chanele — by her nature, or because no other possible role was open to her — proved to be a quiet, undemanding child, who allowed herself to be ordered about rather than issuing the orders — it soon became quite obvious which, in the old proverb, was the dog and which the flea.
Rather than playing with Chanele, Mimi had chosen to befriend Anne-Kathrin, with whom she could gather pearls and diamonds on the banks of the Surb, while Chanele insisted, with precocious maturity, that they were all only pebbles. When Mimi and Anne-Kathrin rescued the kitten that time, Chanele had only looked at the soaking creature, unmoved, her eyes small with concentration, and then said, ‘You know it’s a tom? We’ll have to have it castrated.’ But it then turned out, very much to Golde’s relief, that she had just picked the expression up somewhere, and had no concrete idea of what it meant.
Over the years a tradition of mutual disregard had grown up between the two young women, a ceasefire marked on both sides by unspoken contempt. Only sometimes, mostly begun by Mimi, were there violent arguments, although they didn’t clear the air like summer storms, but just went on rumbling and stopped at the horizon with thunder and lightning.
‘What do you want from Janki?’
‘What am I supposed to want from him?’
‘You’re giving him presents.’
‘Where does it say in the Shulchan Orech that I’m not allowed to?’
‘You knew I was sewing a money bag for him! What have you given him?’
‘Does that concern anyone but him?’
‘I want to say something to you.’ Mimi became so friendly that Chanele involuntarily lifted the pottery plate that she was holding in her hand like a shield in front of her chest. ‘A man like Janki isn’t interested in girls whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’
Chanele put the plate down on the table more violently than she needed to. And the cutlery that she took from the drawer clattered down more loudly than usual.
‘What do I care what he’s interested in?’
‘You gave him something!’
‘Don’t worry! It isn’t a red velvet money bag.’
‘Morocco leather! It’s Morocco leather!’
‘Make Shabbos with it!’ For the Sabbath you need very practical things: bread, wine, a piece of meat in your soup. Anything one might ironically compare with those is without reasonable value.
‘What have you given him?’ In her impatience Mimi held on tightly to Chanele’s hand. Chanele pulled away and went on laying the breakfast table.
‘A brush.’
‘A brush?’
‘And a rag.’
‘What sort of present is that? A rag?’
So that he can clean his boots. By the time he gets to Baden he’ll look as if he’s just emerged from a pigsty. Is he supposed to greet his customers with mucky shoes?’
Whether Mimi started laughing out of relief or because she found Chanele’s present so pitifully unromantic she couldn’t have said in retrospect. Any more than Chanele had an illuminating explanation for why she threw the damp cloth with which she had just wiped out the pan for the breakfast eggs into Mimi’s face. Mimi grabbed Chanele by the throat. Chanele clawed her fingers into Mimi’s unkempt curls.
When he heard the cries, Salomon Meijer, with his phylacteries still on his forehead and arm, came running from the sitting room, stood helplessly in the doorway and said, because one may not, when one has put on the tefillin, engage in conversation with anyone but God, only: ‘Now! Now! Now!’ Golde had just been combing her hair, before hiding it once more under the sheitel for the day, and with the thin grey strands over her white nightshirt she looked, like a girl grown old, even smaller than usual. She pushed the two young women apart, a dog separating two cattle much larger than itself, slapped them both roundly and demanded to know — ‘right now this minute!’ — what evil spirit had possessed them and made them so meshuga in broad daylight.