‘Nu?’ thought Mimi.
‘Might it not be that they simply liked the story? Because it was a good story? Because people like to believe good stories? Even though they know that they can’t be true? What do you think?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it: they put a story in the paper so that no one would buy from Janki. So we have to come up with a better story to make them change their minds. They’re lying? So be it. We’ll just lie better!’
Chanele had spent a long time sitting on the edge of the fountain, dipping her arm into the water. She felt as if she had to wash the man’s touch off her, as if his hand on her sleeve had left a stain that everyone could see on her. She herself didn’t understand, couldn’t explain to herself, why she hadn’t just pulled away and pushed him off, why she had answered him, why she had answered him in front of those men, why she had spoken of something that didn’t even concern Golde, why she had let him…
‘There you are,’ said an unfamiliar voice. Chanele spun round and lifted her arms as if to ward off a blow.
It was the barber’s wife, a bony, matter-of-fact person that you could have imagined behind a market stall if there hadn’t been a smell of talcum and face lotion about her. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere,’ she said.
‘Leave me alone!’ Chanele heard herself talking in a strange voice, fearful and insecure.
The woman sat down next to her on the edge of the fountain. ‘Careful,’ she said after a pause, ‘you’re making your dress all wet.’
Chanele defiantly plunged her arm even deeper into the water.
‘They’re men,’ said the woman. ‘Men need enemies. I don’t know why. It seems just to be something inside them.’
‘What do want with me?’
‘If they speak,’ said the woman, ‘then you have to let them speak. There’s nothing you can do. But I wasn’t happy about the way they treated you. Why did you come into our shop, of all places?’
‘I thought a barber…’
‘There are six barbers in Baden. Five other barbers. Everybody knows my husband doesn’t like Jews.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Chanele, feeling guilty. ‘I just wanted…’
‘I heard what you wanted.’ It sounded like a reproach. ‘Completely wrong. You don’t do something like that with razors. You have to pluck. It hurts, but you’ll survive. Here.’ She held a tin out to Chanele.
Chanele folded her arms.
‘As you wish,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t care.’ She dropped the tin into the fountain and got to her feet. ‘But you’d really look a lot prettier without those eyebrows.
On her own again, Chanele looked at the tin for a long time. It hadn’t sunk, but floated, turning gently bobbing circles on the surface of the water. On the lid, two heads stared into the distance: an English officer with a bushy moustache and a dark-haired man in a turban. Above the picture it said in ornate writing: Original Indian Macassar Hair Pomade. The tin seemed to be trying to make its way towards her again and again, and each time it did, before it reached the edge, it was driven away again by the stream of water from the fountain pipe.
At last Chanele reached into the water, fetched the tin out and opened the lid. The tin seemed to be full to the brim with crumpled paper, the firm, light brown paper that is pulled over the head-rests of barbers’ chairs. It rustled when she unfolded it.
When she saw what the strange woman had brought her, Chanele’s eyes filled with tears.
It was a pair of tweezers.
‘He fought in the Battle of Sedan,’ said Pinchas.
‘He says he never heard a shot.’
‘Could be. But that doesn’t make a good story. And of course he was wounded. A bullet went through his arm.’
‘Heaven forbid!’ Mimi cried in horror.
‘You’re right, Miriam,’ said Pinchas, ‘let’s leave his arm alone.’
Mimi nodded with relief.
‘He needs his arm for his work. They shot him in the leg.’
‘What?’
‘You choose which one.’ Pinchas laughed. He was completely transformed, he talked uninhibitedly, gesticulated and kept interrupting Mimi.
‘That tailor he worked for in Paris. What’s his name?’
‘Delormes. But he’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ said Pinchas and nodded contentedly. ‘That’s good. Then he won’t contradict us. And this friend of yours, what’s her name?’
‘Anne-Kathrin. Is she going to appear in the story as well?’
‘She’s going to lend us paper and ink,’ said Pinchas. ‘We’ve got to write it all down.’
9
‘An interesting anecdote from the Franco-Prussian War. During the siege of Paris — our correspondent reported extensively on this in these very pages — a series of events began which will provoke shock and sympathy in the heart of any well-intentioned and sensitive human being. We have no wish to deprive our dear readership of the report that has only lately reached our ears, not least because the chain of events in its outermost link has also touched our lovely town of Baden, confirming the saying of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that war is the father of all things.’
Pinchas, who read the Tagblatt every day, had insisted on the convoluted sentence construction. The classical quotation was supplied by Anne-Kathrin, who had a large supply of them thanks to her father.
‘Our lady readers, particularly if they regularly study Die Dame or Jardin des Modes’ (a contribution from Mimi) ‘will be familiar with the name François Delormes. This master of the needle, as effusive admirers have praised him in the past, proudly refused, in spite of the requests of his many friends and admirers, to leave his beloved native city before the outbreak of hostilities. In a reversal of the cynical saying, he would dismiss all warnings with, Ubi bene, ibi patria.’
If it had been up to Anne-Kathrin, Monsieur Delormes would have added, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’ But Mimi and Pinchas had firmly rejected that one.
‘The steely grip of the siege was closing ever more tightly around the French capital, and soon the city of lights sank into leaden darkness. The fearful silence of a hospital reigned where once everyone had sung and danced so gaily. Where the Erinnyes rule, the Muses fall silent.’
Pinchas had to explain to the others what Erinnyes were, and Mimi, who had always taken him as a pure student of the Talmud, was surprised by his knowledge.
‘Food supplies were growing increasingly scarce. Each inhabitant of Paris was given a daily allowance of just a hundred grammes of bad bread, and anyone who managed to acquire this pitiful amount for himself and his loved ones considered himself lucky.
‘For François Delormes, who had been made rich long since by the popularity of his fashionable creations, it would have been an easy matter to escape the restrictions of these days of starvation and buy the choicest delicacies from the profiteers who, as everyone knows, multiply like bluebottles on a carcass in times of need. But nothing could have been further from this brave man’s mind. He had the contents of his cellar distributed among the needy, and he himself settled for water and dry bread.’
Inspired by his newly discovered journalistic talents, Pinchas had also sketched out a passage in which Monsieur Delormes set one day each week aside for fasting, but the others deleted it again as being too Jewish.
‘But that was not enough! When the siege was at its worst François Delormes gathered his closest colleagues around him—’