The two walked side by side in silence, so quickly that they repeatedly passed other, slower walkers, a peasant woman with a basket full of chickens, or a basket-maker balancing all his goods piled high on his back. As he marched, Janki kept his eyes fixed firmly forward, and yet he could have described quite precisely what Chanele was wearing: a brown dress of a fabric which was known in Paris as ‘paysanne’, and which Monsieur Delormes only bought so that he could give a few metres of it to a washer-woman or a seamstress. The fabric was too heavy to fall really loosely, but the tailor — if it had not been Chanele herself — had brought out the waist so skilfully that the skirt puffed out in a bell-like shape at the hips, and swung with every step she took. The round neckline and the sleeves were trimmed with something that looked at first sight like lace, but which was only folded white batist, a material that was normally used for petticoats and night-shirts, for everything, Janki had learned that touches the skin directly.
Chanele’s petticoat, he was sure, was bound to be of less fine a material, and her blouse…
‘You shouldn’t have taken the trouble,’ he said. ‘I would have been happy to bring you whatever it is that you need.’
‘Thank you,’ Chanele replied. And then, ten or twenty paces later, ‘It’s something that men know nothing about.’
Her hair was, as always, rolled up in a bun and pushed into a net. For the journey she had put on a headscarf and sometimes, because she needed to cool down or was lost in thoughts, she put her hand to the back of her neck and lifted the bundle of hair a little as if to test its weight. Janki’s father had always done that with his money bag when the last farmer had gone and he wanted to assess his takings.
Janki tried to imagine how long Chanele’s hair might be, whether when she combed it it reached to her belt or even further, and whether in bed at night…
‘It could be a hot day,’ he said.
‘Even hotter if you have to iron the laundry,’ she said.
Chanele walked at the same pace as he did, left, right, left, right, without, as most women would have done, tripping along after his long soldier’s stride. She must have had powerful legs, and yet, to judge by the slenderness of her arms, they were certainly not thick. You could imagine that Chanele…
‘What are you going to do now?’ she asked.
Janki had to reflect for a moment before he remembered why he was travelling to Baden.
‘He could just as easily have stayed here and learned something from me,’ said Salomon Meijer. He was sitting at the table in the sitting room and had set out a fat book and a stack of papers and notes. ‘This business about blood lines is an extremely interesting matter.’
Golde, the hard working woman, considered Salomon’s big project of drawing up the definitive family tree of all the Simmental cows kept in the district to be impractical nonsense, but she didn’t contradict her husband. But as they had been married for a long time, Salomon still responded to her reservations.
‘If I ever finish it…’
‘If,’ thought Golde.
‘… one will be able to predict whether a cow is worth something even before it is born. And not only me, but someone who hasn’t the first notion about beheimes. Like Janki, for example.’
‘He isn’t even interested in it.’
‘He will be. He can forget all about his drapery store, that meshugas. But he has a head on his shoulders, and if he involved himself in the cattle trade…’
‘Do you think he really likes Mimi?’ Golde had skipped over a whole chain of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’, but she had only arrived at the spot where Salomon was already.
‘If he isn’t an idiot…’ said Salomon Meijer.
‘No,’ said Golde, ‘an idiot he isn’t.’
They could talk as openly as this because Mimi had gone for a walk again. ‘You’ve been going for lots of walks lately,’ Salomon had grumbled, but then he had decided not to enquire into the matter any further. He wouldn’t have received an answer, or at least not an honest one. Because Mimi’s path took her not into the countryside but into the middle of the village, to a door that she normally avoided if possible, to a very surprised Sarah Pomeranz.
Mimi had set out very precisely the story she wanted to telclass="underline" how her father had claimed she couldn’t even make an omelette without burning it — he had actually once said something similar — and how she had then planned to surprise him, to prove her culinary arts, with a home-made cake. ‘It will have to be a very special cake,’ she was going to say, ‘a cake for King Solomon in person. I only know one person in Endingen who can give me the recipe for such a cake, so…’ But when Sarah opened the door, swathed in an aura of rosewater and bubbling oil, her concerns about Janki were greater than all her plans, and Mimi only said impatiently, ‘Where is Pinchas?’
‘Where do you think? In the shop.’
There can hardly be a less favourable moment to meet the woman you dream about every night than when you are precooking cow’s intestines. Your hands aren’t just dirty, they’re repellently slippery, you look like an old maid because you’ve tied a cloth around your hair so that the smell doesn’t linger in it, and worst of all you can’t interrupt your work. Intestines precooked for too long fall apart and can’t be used for sausages.
‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ said Pinchas, ‘but…’
‘Don’t stop!’ He bent obediently over the steaming pot and stirred around with a big paddle with holes in it, the kind also used in laundries. The steam had covered all the surfaces with a pattern of tiny drops.
‘Wouldn’t it be better if we waited until…?’ asked Pinchas.
But Mimi felt that she had a mission, and a mission can’t wait. Not even if there’s a sickly, rotten stench in the air and you’ve just stepped in some yellowish-green sludge. ‘First of all,’ she said, just as she had planned to on the journey, ‘first of all’ — she had at last found a relatively clean spot where one could stand without touching anything — ‘first of all one thing must be clear: nothing can come of us. Ever.’
‘But…’ said Pinchas.’
‘Never.’ Mimi felt like a character in a novel.
‘What if my father lends me the money for the pivot tooth?’
‘It has nothing to do with that.’
‘I fell because I was reading as I walked, and tripped. That’s how I knocked my tooth out. But with a pivot tooth…’
‘Enough about your wretched pivot tooth!’ The conversation wasn’t going as Mimi had planned.
‘I know it looks ugly.’
‘You’re not ugly.’
‘Do you really think so, Miriam?’
It wasn’t easy to tell through the clouds of steam, but Mimi actually had a sense that Pinchas was blushing.
‘I mean…’ she said.
‘You’ve just made me very happy.’
He just didn’t seem to understand what she was trying to say to him. Luckily a sentence occurred to her, one that she had liked a great deal in a book and which suited the situation perfectly. ‘Our hearts don’t sing the same tune,’ she said.
‘What sort of tune?’ asked Pinchas.
‘No tune. Forget the tune!’
‘You said…’
‘I was going to say: you and I are just too different.’
‘Of course we’re different,’ said Pinchas and bent low over his pot. ‘I’m a man and you’re a woman. So—’
‘Are you even listening to me?’ asked Mimi.
But Pinchas had stopped listening. He had spotted from some change in the stock pot that the right moment had come, so he hauled the paddle out, the pale white intestines snaking from it, laid it over the edges of the pot and then — Mimi felt a bitter taste rising in her throat and couldn’t look away — then he grabbed the revolting, wobbly stuff with his bare hands, pulled it hand over fist out of the brew and hung it in dripping garlands on a stand.