‘So,’ Pinchas said at last and walked over to her, ‘now we can talk.’
Mimi started retching.
In Baden, Chanele was being shown around the shop that she’d already heard so much about, and saying, because Janki seemed to expect as much, a few words of praise about the establishment. She felt as if she was being challenged to say something about the carpentry of the coffin-maker at a funeral. All the time when she was in the shop not a single customer appeared, and when she left to go shopping, Janki was standing forlornly behind his new counter, a little boy with a birthday present that the other children don’t want to play with.
Red Moische, and also the pedlars by whom Endingen was sometimes overrun as if by ants in the spring, feared Chanele as an expert customer. She knew how to test the firmness of a hem with her teeth, and which colour the gills of a carp should have if it was really fresh. Golde even let her go shopping for the chicken on Shabbos, and Chanele only had to look at a bird to predict to within half a cup how much fat it would produce. Here in the town everything was different. The shops were strange, the traders unfamiliar, and Chanele didn’t even know exactly what kind of shop she should do her shopping in. She stood for a long while in front of a shop window full of all kinds of tools, before walking on. She was already holding the handle to the door of the hardware shop, but she didn’t like the look of the owner, who was smiling at her so expectantly through the glass. In the end she decided for a barber.
When the shop doorbell rang, three men turned their heads to her at once: the barber, his customer and a man dressed in grey who, Tagblatt in hand, was waiting to be served. Only the hairdresser’s wife, ensconced on a high chair behind the till, didn’t seem to notice her. The three of them studied Chanele for a moment, saw nothing worth looking at, and resumed the conversation they had been having when she came in.
‘Now finish your story, Bruppbacher,’ said the customer. When he talked, only the freshly shaven half of his face seemed to move, while the other, behind a thick application of soapy foam, lay dead next to it.
The barber was dressed like an artist, with a narrow neckerchief tied into a bow. On his upper lip there sat a waxed moustache that ended in a point, the masterpiece that a craftsman proudly puts on display in his window. ‘Certainly, Doctor,’ he said. ‘So the man waits and waits. Eventually the landlord closes the book and says, “Sorry, we have only one very small room free. And I’m sorry to say that your nose wouldn’t fit in it.”’
The man with the foam on his face laughed.
The waiting man lowered his paper. ‘Vulgar,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Jokes don’t solve problems.’
‘Excuse me.’ Chanele took a step into the barber’s shop. ‘Do you have razors?’
‘No,’ the barber replied, ‘I shave my customers with a spoon.’
The man in the chair laughed so violently that he blew scraps of foam into the air.
‘I mean,’ said Chanele, ‘what I meant was: do you have razors for sale?’
‘Of course,’ said the barber. ‘I sell razors and tobacco and silk stockings. Welcome to the Baden emporium!’
The visible half of his customer’s face turned crimson. He had choked on the shaving foam out of sheer delight.
‘Have some manners,’ the man in the grey suit said reproachfully and turned to Chanele. ‘What kind of razor were you after?’
‘I think I’ve come to the wrong place.’ Chanele was about to turn to leave, but the man grabbed her arm and wouldn’t let go.
‘No, no, tell us! What kind of razor do you need?’
Chanele looked at the floor in embarrassment. She tried to free herself, but the man’s hand was as firm as iron. Then she whispered almost silently: ‘I thought a barber… If you want to remove facial hair…’
‘Facial hair?’ The man’s fingers ran almost tenderly over the flower in his lapel. ‘We can’t help you there, I’m afraid. If you’d needed one to slit your throat, we’d have been happy to help you.’ He said it so politely, without raising his voice, that it took Chanele a few seconds to understand his meaning.
The man in the shaving chair only started laughing then as well.
The barber’s wife, who had followed the whole conversation with an expressionless face climbed down from her high chair and pushed Chanele towards the door. ‘It’s better if you go now. Can’t you tell that you’re not wanted here?’ she said.
Mimi would never have thought that she would one day be sitting with Pinchas in Anne-Kathrin’s gazebo. But she had to talk to him, she needed fresh air, and there aren’t many places in a village where you can go unobserved. They sat as far away from one another as the hexagon of the bench allowed. Pinchas stared out into the garden as if he was interested only in rosebushes and bunches of elderflower. Without noticing, he kept sticking the tip of his tongue through the gap in his teeth; it looked as if there was something alive in his mouth.
‘Yesterday you said you’d try to help him. Help us. Help me.’
‘I’d do anything for you.’ The sentence had been waiting a whole night to at last be uttered, and it forced its way out of Pinchas like a prisoner from his dark cell.
‘Even though you know…?’
‘Not the same tune. I’ve understood.’ Pinchas lowered his head. He would have had quite an attractive profile if it hadn’t been for that sparse beard. And the gap in his teeth, of course.
‘Janki and I, on the other hand…’ She sensed that she was hurting Pinchas by saying these words, and it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling. How had they put it in that Mimi novel? Savage brutality.
‘Do you see any possible way of helping him?’ she asked. ‘That article…’
‘I’ve thought about it.’
‘And you could…?’ Her voice suddenly sounded wheedling, a child that wants something it hasn’t really deserved. He knew this voice was a lie, but he happily allowed himself to be lied to.
‘You know what I learned yesterday in Gemara?’ he asked and added quickly: ‘It’s relevant. I think it’s relevant.’
And so it came to pass that Pinchas, in the gazebo of the goyish schoolmaster, told the story of Rabba bar bar Chana, who claimed that while on a sea voyage he had encountered a fish, entirely covered with sand and grass and so big that people thought it was an island, that they disembarked and lit a fire on the fish to prepare their dinner. Mimi didn’t interrupt him until he had also told her how the fish, when it felt its back getting hotter and hotter, plunged into the water, and all the seamen would have drowned if their ship hadn’t been anchored so close by. Only then did she ask, ‘And what are you telling us?’
‘Well,’ said Pinchas, ‘of course the story isn’t true. Any more than the story in the paper is true. And even so, our sages in Babylon wrote it down and put it in the Talmud. Then the question arises: why?’ Pinchas lapsed back into the tune of a Talmudic disputation. ‘What could the reason be? Are we to learn something from the story? Are we to believe that there are fish that people can mistake for islands? Hardly. The Amoraeans who wrote the Talmud were practical people. They were concerned with barriers for artesian wells and things of that kind. They knew that history was a fairy tale and still they preserved it for later generations. What reason might they have had for that?’