Just before twelve, when Janki was adding up all the francs and Louis d’or that he had pointlessly and senselessly pulverised for the dream of his own shop, when he was already setting out the arguments for Uncle Salomon, who would, it was true, not welcome his failure, but would comment upon it with the benefit of hindsight, when he was already wondering whether the tailor Oggenfuss could use someone who knew something about fabrics, so, when he — he who lies to himself cheats doubly — was almost ready to admit his defeat, something unexpected happened. A man came into the shop, came down the steps like someone entering a house that he has just bought for the first time, peered attentively around, only then seemed to notice Janki and said with a smile that was more a baring of teeth, ‘Jean Meijer — is that you?’
Janki nodded curtly, as Monsieur had done with dubious customers. ‘With whom do I have the pleasure?’
‘We will find out later whether it is a pleasure or not,’ said the man. ‘How many customers have you had today?’
‘I’m not sure…’
‘How many it was, or whether it’s any of my business? I can tell you the answer to the first: not a single one.’
There was nothing special about the man. He was about forty, not big and not small, not fat and not thin. He wore a grey suit of heavy tweed, the jacket done in the German style with a belt at the back. An edelweiss made of fabric was fastened to the lapel of his frock coat.
‘Did you want to buy anything?’ asked Janki.
The man barked with laughter. ‘You have a good sense of humour,’ he said. ‘Gallows humour. Which, as I see it, might be a very suitable expression.’ He walked around the counter and, without asking permission, opened one of the doors. He ran two fingers along a dark brown Jacquard material woven with orange flowers, smelled his fingers as if the quality of what he had felt could be read from them, and then said appreciatively, ‘Very pretty. Good quality. One might actually feel sorry that no one will be interested in it. Until it is placed on sale when the shop goes out of business.’
Janki clearly felt a blood vessel pulsing in his throat and wondered for a moment if it was the vein that the shochet had to sever cleanly if the slaughtered animal was not to be impure. ‘I have no intention of abandoning my shop,’ he said, and for the first time he had the feeling that the Yiddish melody made his German sound somehow inferior.
‘Nicely put.’ The man showed his teeth again. ‘But sometimes in life we do things we don’t intend to. Have you read the Tagblatt today?’
The question was so unexpected that Janki was stumped for an answer.
‘There is a very interesting article in it,’ said the man. ‘Page four.’ He pulled a folded newspaper from the inside pocket of his jacket and held it out to Janki. ‘Here. A little courtesy between colleagues. With the compliments of the local shop-owners.’
He stopped again in the doorway, looked around and sniffed. ‘Hm. One might wonder: is that still the old spices, or is it already the new stench?’
7
The article ‘from our Paris correspondent’ sympathetically described the oppressive conditions in the French capital, which had had to endure not only starvation under the Prussian siege, but also the lawlessness of the so-called Commune and the horrors of its bloody defeat. ‘Lutetia’, the correspondent wrote in flowery terms, ‘is like a virgin sorely tried by fate. Even yesterday she still skipped on rosy toes from delightful dance to delightful dance, and today she drags herself wearily through the streets, her features gaunt, more bowed by shame at her own frivolity than by longing for her former glory.’ The article spoke of Castor and Pollux, the two elephants from the Jardin des Plantes, whose trunks had appeared, at the height of the famine, in the English butcher’s shop on Boulevard Haussmann, ‘to give a few wealthy profiteers the chance of one last debauch, while all around wailing infants sought in vain the withered breasts of their mothers’. With revulsion, but also with a certain relish, the author went on to describe the bloodbath at Père Lachaise Cemetery, at which French troops had once and for all put down the uprising of the Communards, ‘their blood a bitter but necessary fertiliser, to let the tender sprouts of law and order flourish once more in place of the barricades erected by the deluded fanatics.’
The correspondent went into the greatest detail about the regrettable hygiene conditions in Paris. He described the prevalence of rats and other pests, explaining this not only with reference to the collapse of refuse collection, but also to the fact that their natural enemies, dogs and cats, had ended up in the pots and pans of the starving Parisians, ‘and had indeed, even at the most noted restaurants, at Brébant and Tortoni, appeared on menus under the most fantastical names’. As scientists were agreed that rats could spread devastating plagues with their droppings — ‘We need think only of cholera, whose hordes of vandals have time and again stormed across our own peaceful land’ — the authorities had passed strict rulings to ensure that the two disasters of war and popular uprising were not followed by a third. All supplies of goods and products contaminated by rat droppings — after that hungry winter there were no food supplies left — were to be delivered by decree to the new government, and destroyed by fire under the auspices of the authorities. This draconian measure had led to great losses among many traders and manufacturers, driving some of them to ruin, but had nonetheless been accepted and obeyed in the interest of the health of the nation.
Only, and this passage was marked in red ink in the margin of the newspaper, only a few reckless businessmen whose own dirty profits trumped, as they saw it, the lives of their fellow citizens, had once again found ways and means to evade the law. These people — the correspondent, who had hitherto believed from the bottom of his heart in the natural equality of all peoples and nations, wrote it very much against his will — were almost to a man sons of Abraham. They smuggled contaminated goods, such as fabrics for clothes, out of the country where they were then, only superficially cleaned, sold on by the fellow members of their line, to credulous folk. What a rude awakening awaited these harmless customers, who could not guess that death and pestilence lurked in the goods that they had supposedly acquired at such a keen price! The correspondent had learned with horror that even in idyllic Baden, where one imagined oneself so far from war and revolution, a new shop was to be opened that would offer for sale materials from that self-same city of Paris. Without wishing in the present case to level at anyone accusations which might — and the correspondent’s deep-rooted love of humanity led him to hope as much from the bottom of his heart — be unfounded, after weighing up the pros and cons he considered it his duty to raise a warning voice in the public interest. ‘Caveat emptor!’ he wrote in conclusion, and added for readers without a knowledge of the Latin tongue, the translation, ‘May the buyer beware!’
Janki began to crumple the newspaper, then changed his mind and carefully smoothed it out again on the counter.
Pinchas Pomeranz only ever allowed himself to read the Badener Tagblatt when, after working in the butcher’s shop, he had studied and understood the prescribed passage from the Talmud, his daily page of the Gemara. That Monday it was already after eight o’clock in the evening by the time he had finally battled his way through a particularly tricky passage from the Bava Basra tractate. It had been a hair-splitting and rather boring discussion about the correct level of restrictions surrounding wells, but in the middle the wise Rabba bar bar Chana had suddenly started telling fantastical tales. He talked of a crocodile the size of a city of sixty houses, and a fish so huge that seafarers confused it with an island.