‘That newspaper article…’
‘Yes,’ said Janki. ‘That newspaper article. I didn’t hear a single shot in the whole war, and now I’m being killed with newsprint.’
‘What will you do?’
Janki spread his arms, further and further, as if he wanted to take off and fly away. ‘There are enough stables in the world,’ he said at last. ‘There is always room for someone who can hold a pitchfork. Then, in response to a command that he alone had heard, he set off once more, left, right, left, right. When he passed Mimi, his shoulders were weighed down as if by a kitbag.
Mimi ran after him. ‘Here! A letter came for you. From Paris!’
Janki slit open the seal and unfolded the paper very slowly, a condemned man without hope that his request for pardon will be heard. He read the letter, nodded, nodded again, and on his face there appeared the same expression that the dead sometimes wore when their sinews contract and it looks as if they are laughing.
‘That fits,’ said Janki. ‘Monsieur Delormes is dead.’
During the siege of Paris, François Delormes had eaten his fill. He knew a lot of diplomats and officers, and a man has as few secrets from his tailor as he does from his valet. François Delormes had known more than many others what was about to happen in Paris, and he had prepared himself. In the private dressing room reserved for the best customers, he had installed a shelf and filled it over the weeks, with bottles of wine, of course, champagne that makes the heart beat faster, and Burgundy that warms it, but above all with the delicacies that would soon cease to exist, foie gras from the Périgord, in yellow tins that gleamed like the purest gold, oval terrines, in which pheasants and hares slumbered under layers of fat as they awaited their resurrection, baskets of oranges and lemons, sugarloafs lined up side by side, with blue ribbons around their bellies, court officials before a state banquet waiting for the guests to arrive. On the stands, where in times of peace the hangers with half-finished clothes had jostled, there now hung whole hams and sides of bacon, fat sausages from the Ardennes and thin ones from the Belgian border. When the besieging army encircled the city and the roar of the cannons became louder and louder, François Delormes dismissed all his employers, the cutters and the seamstresses, the old ironing ladies and the young girls with the slender fingers who had sewn on the sequins for the evening gowns. He shut himself away in his studio, and while Paris starved he sat alone in his town house on the Rue de Rivoli and ate. When he was found, the leg of a confit guinea fowl was still stuck in his throat; in his greed he had tried to swallow it, all at once.
There was nothing of any of this in the letter, only that the writers regretted to inform Monsieur Jean Meijer that Maître François Delormes had not survived the siege of his city, and that Monsieur Meijer would unfortunately have to start his new business, for which, incidentally, they wished him the very best of luck, without a letter of recommendation. The letter was signed by one Paul-Marc Lemercier, whom Janki remembered as a dry accountant, and to whom the firm now apparently belonged.
‘That fits,’ said Janki bitterly. ‘That fits precisely.’
Dinner time had passed long ago, but there was still a plate ready for Janki on the table. Chanele had kept some soup warm, which, if hours passed and the soup was to stay tasty, represented a lot of effort, but when Janki just sat there and didn’t even touch his spoon, she didn’t press him and asked no questions. It was Mimi who told her at last what had happened, not mentioning Pinchas once, and reacting furiously. Salomon wanted to know since when she read the papers.
‘I’m not a child any more!’ she said, thinking, ‘You have no idea how little of a child I am.’
‘People will forget,’ Golde said consolingly, and didn’t believe her fine words herself.
Salomon stroked his whiskers, shook his head and said thoughtfully, ‘If it is said that a famer has had the plague in his byre—’
‘This isn’t about farmers!’ Chanele cut in, Chanele who never normally involved herself in family discussions. ‘It’s about Janki.’
‘You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll make my own way. That is: I’ll make some sort of way. Somewhere.’ As he sat there so dejectedly, behind Janki’s narrow face one could sense the gaunt bird-like head that he would one day have as an old man.
‘They’ll forget,’ Golde repeated. ‘They’ll definitely forget.’
‘Why?’
Uncle Melnitz, whom no one had thought about while all the changes and plans of the past few weeks were going on, pushed his chair closer to the table. He was, as always, dressed all in black, and he enjoyed, as always, his own pessimism.
‘Why should they forget? They never forget anything. The more absurd it is, the more clearly they remember it. Just as they remember that we slaughter little children, always before Pesach, and bake their blood in matzohs. It’s never happened, but even five hundred years later they can tell you how we did it. How we enticed the little boy from his parents, how we promised him presents or chocolate, long before chocolate existed. They know every detail.
‘They can describe to you the knife we used, as precisely as if they’d held it in their own hands. They know where we made the cut, at the throat or above the heart, they know what the bowl looks like, the one we caught the blood in, every year, everywhere, because matzohs aren’t kosher without Christian blood. They know it all. They can tell you the name of the child, quite precisely. It says so on the saints’ calendar. It’s never happened, but they remember, they have a grave that they visit, an altar, and on feast days they stove in a few Jewish heads by way of commemoration.
‘Forget? They forget nothing. The truths, perhaps, but not the lies. They still know the stories that the Babylonians and the Romans came up with against us, and they tell those stories and they believe them. Sometimes they say, “We are modern people so we know that none of that is true,” but they still don’t stop believing in it. It’s stuck firmly in their heads. Lies have a lot of barbs, they surely do.
‘Sometimes you won’t hear the lie for a few years, but it’s just sleeping then and collecting its strength. Until somewhere a child disappears, or someone remembers a child that did. Then it’s wide awake again. Then we’re holding the knife in our hands again, the long, sharp knife, then we gather in a circle again with our beards and our crooked noses, then we stab away again, and the child goes on screaming, the poor, innocent, fair-haired child, and we go on laughing as we always laugh, and the blood flows into the bowl again, and again we bake it into our matzohs, and everything is as it was. They don’t forget.
‘They can name the passages in the Talmud that aren’t in it, and which they’ve all read anyway. They know our commandments, which don’t exist, very precisely, they know them better than their own. Forget? Do you really think they forget anything?’
Janki’s soup had gone cold long ago, but they were all still sitting around the table, sitting straight on their chairs and not looking at each other. Only Uncle Melnitz had made himself comfortable, had spread himself out and leaned back like someone who has decided to stay for a long time. He talked and talked.
No one listened to him.
Everyone tried not to listen to him.
8
Then Janki did go back to Baden, hopelessly, as one plays to the end a game one has lost, just to count up the points that one will have to pay. To general surprise Chanele went with him. She needed to buy something, she explained, and besides, she hadn’t been in Baden for ages, and had an unclaimed day off. Salomon couldn’t contradict her on this one, because if one wanted to look at it in those terms, Chanele had never had a day off; she was seen as a member of the family, and for that reason she wasn’t paid a wage.