Now everyone capable of thinking practically knows that one child on its own makes far more work than two, and when on one of his trips the opportunity presented itself — a mother had died in childbed and her husband had lost his mind over it — Salomon intervened with an investment as practical and unsentimental as buying a calf cheap and feeding it up until it paid for itself several times over as a milk cow.
So Chanele was not a daughter of the house, but neither was she a serving-girl; she was treated sometimes as one and sometimes the other, she was in no one’s heart and no one’s way. She wore clothes which she sewed herself or which Mimi didn’t like any more, and her hair was hidden away in a net, as if she were a married woman; she who has no dowry need not stay on the look-out for a husband. When she laughed she was even pretty, except that her eyebrows were too broad, they crossed through her face as one crosses through a calculation that is wrong or has been dealt with.
Chanele had laid the meal out on the kitchen table. There had been nothing to cook, because food is brought to a shiva to spare the mourners the task. Even so, a powerful fire was blazing in the stove, crackling fir logs that quickly gave off their heat. It was still freezing outside at night, although they would already be celebrating Seder in two weeks; Pesach fell early that year, 1871.
‘So?’
When Salomon Meijer was hungry, he grew impatient. He sat at the table, hands left and right on the wood, as the mohel lays out his instruments before a circumcision. He had already said HaMotzi, had sprinkled salt over a bit of bread, said the blessing over it and put it in his mouth. But after that he had not gone on to help himself, because he placed value on everyone sitting with him at table when he was, after all, at home. He could eat alone any day of the week. Now he drummed his right hand on the table-top, repeatedly lifting his wrist in rhythm, as musicians do when they wish to demonstrate their skill to the audience. His fingers danced, although it was not a cheerful dance, one that might easily, in a public house, have led to a fight.
Mimi came in at last, with a theatrically tripping step designed to demonstrate how much of a hurry she was really in. Although there was no real need, she had changed her clothes again, and was now wearing a mouse-grey dressing gown, slightly too long, so that the hem dragged along the stone floor. ‘Those people,’ she said. ‘All those people! Isn’t it ennuyant?’
Mimi loved precious words, as she loved everything elegant, she picked them up in goyish books that she borrowed secretly from Anne-Kathrin, the school-master’s daughter, and scattered her everyday conversation with them as if they were gold-dust. Inclined as she was towards refinement, she didn’t like the fact that everyone still called her Mimi, a children’s name that she had long — ‘Really, Mamme, for ages now’ — outgrown. At fifteen, and nobody could remind her of this for fear of provoking a storm of tears, she had once flirted with Mimolette, and Salomon, never averse to a joke, had actually called her that for a few days, before confessing with a laugh that in France it was the name of a cheese. Since then she had tried to gain acceptance at least for Miriam, which was her actual name, but had been unable to do anything about the old family habit.
Mimi had everything a beauty needs, immaculate white skin, full lips, big brown eyes that always glistened a little mistily, long, softly wavy black hair. But for some reason — she had spent hours at the mirror and been unable to find an explanation for it — the perfect individual parts didn’t really fit together where she was concerned, just as a soup sometimes simply refuses to taste right despite being made of the best ingredients. She gave no sign of this self-doubt, tending on the contrary to behave in an arrogant and even patronising manner, so much so that her mother had asked her more than once if she actually thought she was Esther out of the Bible, waiting for messengers, in search of the most beautiful virgins, to come to Endingen to bring her to their king.
Now the four of them were sitting around the table. There were bigger families in the community, but when Salomon Meijer considered his loved ones like this, he was quite content with what God had given him, a very practical contentment based on the fact — and who knows this better than a cattle dealer, who gets around the place? — that he could have been much worse off.
There was, as there always is after shivas, far too much food on the table. Three bowls alone of chopped boiled eggs, half a salted carp, a plate of herrings, but just a few, meagre herrings, for red-haired Moische was a stingy man, even though he had had a sign painted for his shop that was bigger than the premises itself. It was customary simply to put down the food one had brought, without a name and without a thank-you, but people knew the patters of the plates, knew to whom which crockery belonged — otherwise, how could they have given it back the next day? The pot of sauerkraut, it wouldn’t even have taken the broken handle to know, came from Feigele Dreifuss, known to everyone only as Mother Feigele, because she was the oldest in the village. Every autumn she made two big vats of sauerkraut with juniper berries, even though there had been no one in her house to eat it for a long time now, and then gave it away at every opportunity, brought it to women in childbed to strengthen them, and to the bereaved to comfort them.
On the sideboard, wrapped in a newspaper and shoved into the furthest corner like stolen goods, lay a plaited loaf, a beautiful berches scattered with poppy-seeds, which they would inconspicuously remove from the house tomorrow and feed to the ducks and hens. Christian Hauenstein, the village baker, in whose ovens they baked all their Shabbes loaves and warmed their Shabbes kugels, had sent it, of course without coming by himself. He was a modern man, a free-thinker, as he liked to stress, and wanted to prove to his Jewish customers that he valued them and nurtured no prejudices towards them. No one had ever had the heart to tell him that they couldn’t eat his well-intentioned loaves because they weren’t kosher.
But who needs bread when there’s cheesecake on the table? Above all when it’s the legendary cheesecake that only Sarah Pomeranz could bake. Naftali Pomeranz, whose very name revealed him as an incomer, might have been an important man, a slaughterer and a synagogue sexton, shochet and shammes, he even seemed to want to found a dynasty in these offices, and his son Pinchas, whom he was training up as his successor, was as skilled at delivering a clean slice to the throat as his father, but it was still Sarah who ensured the true reputation of the family with her cake, a masterpiece, everyone agreed, so good ‘that Rothschild himself could not eat finer’, and that was the highest accolade that the village could supply in matters culinary.
Salomon had asked for a second piece to be put on his plate, and chewed with pleasure as Golde, who was not made for sitting still, wondered, with her lower lip sucked in, what should be transferred to which bowl so that all the alien crockery could be washed clean and returned. Mimi toyed with a little piece of cake that she divided with her fork into ever smaller halves, while making the discreetly disgusted face of a doctor forced by his profession to conduct an unpleasant operation.
‘Tomorrow I must leave the house at four,’ said Salomon. ‘You can wrap up all the leftover cake for my journey.’
‘Almost all. A piece must be left for me.’ Chanele, whose uncertain position in the household had made her a good observer, knew precisely when she could risk such pert little remarks. Now Salomon had eaten well; that meant that he was in a benevolent mood.