No, she had to admit it, Janki wasn’t really an honest person, not only because of the walking stick and the artificial limp. But the same quality also made him likeable again, because he fully inhabited all the roles he played; he might have lied, but he believe his lies. He played the businessman like an actor, and he played him well.
Chanele didn’t share these observations with anyone, certainly not with Janki himself. Generally speaking, the two of them exchanged very few words, beyond the purely businesslike. In Endingen Janki had once come out with a story unprompted, about the pub in Guebwiller or the wonders of the city of Paris. Now on the way to Baden he would often walk along beside Chanele for half an hour, and if a milk-cart stopped for them and they had to push their way side by side onto the box seat to sit beside the driver, he seemed to find that contact disagreeable.
Mimi hardly ever got to see Janki now, at least on her own. In the week he left the house early and came back late. On Shabbos, when they would at least have had the right menucha for a reasonable conversation, Salomon almost always brought a business contact or a complete stranger along in his wake, with whom he then proceeded to have endless debates about God and the world over dinner — more about the world than about God, as was inevitably the case in the house of a cattle-trader. Janki always participated in these table discussions between tsibeles and bundel with an interest that Mimi couldn’t quite believe in, he was avoiding her, and Anne-Kathrin thought so too. When he owed the rescue of his business and its obvious success entirely to her initiative. If she hadn’t gone to Pinchas that time — and God knows going to him had not been easy — who knew whether there would still be a French Drapery at all?
On Sunday, without synagogue, without guests and without too rich a meal, which would have made everyone sleepy all afternoon, it was no better. On the pretext of having to keep his business books, Janki locked himself in his attic room for hours at a time, even though there wasn’t so much as a table in it. ‘He can’t look you in the eye,’ was Anne-Kathrin’s interpretation of his behaviour, ‘and there can only be one reason for it.’
Not that Mimi was jealous of Chanele, certainement pas, but who else spent all week with Janki? Who had started plucking her eyebrows, clumsily, of course, so that her face looked plucked rather than prettified, with individual ugly clumps of hair, shrubs that have survived a forest fire? In fact one should feel sorry for Chanele, Anne-Kathrin thought, because she was dreaming a dream from which there could only be a rude awakening, as many novels told one.
But Mimi felt no pity within herself. And no hatred, of course, she would never have stooped to that, but she did feel a certain irritation, and if you said it in French, ‘elle m’irrite’, the word had the unpleasantly scratching sound that corresponded precisely to her feelings.
In all likelihood, without that irritation, she would hardly have said ‘Why not?’ when Abraham Singer was at the door again, she would not, as if by chance, have joined the others in the kitchen and listened to what he had to say.
Abraham Singer was a trader with no goods, at least none that one could carry around with one in a basket or show to a customs man at the border. His business territory took in Alsace, South Germany and Switzerland, but on one occasion his travels brought him all the way to Frankfurt and in one very unusual instance he concluded a deal in Budapest. If anyone asked him — but no one who had to ask was a potential customer anyway — he firmly denied being active in the field in which he had a monopoly, and from which he lived quite well, not like a king, but not like a beggar either. ‘Marriage broker?’ he would say. ‘I’m not a shadchen! Just a curious person who likes to get involved, and may that not be accounted a sin.’
He was a squat, short-legged little man with a crooked spine that kept him permanently bent. Consequently he looked at people from below, which was very useful to him, he claimed, in the profession that he didn’t have. ‘Everyone has learned to lie upwards, but downwards they all forget.’ And then he laughed until tears came to his eyes, and had to take a checked handkerchief, big as a sail, from his pocket to wipe his face. His giggling, which he sometimes couldn’t control for minutes at a time, was so well known in Jewish families that people would say to a mother who was taking too long to marry off her daughter, ‘High time Singer came and laughed at your place.’
A doctor doesn’t go to a house where no one is ill, and similarly Singer never came unplanned, but he always insisted on making his visit seem quite coincidental. Then he sat in the kitchen — ‘No, the parlour would be far too elegant for me, I just dropped in, just for a minute,’ spoke of this and that, told the gossip from lots of communities, talked about illnesses and deaths, but of course always about engagements and weddings too, about a shidduch that had been made here or there, ‘with a dowry, I can’t tell you how big, but the kind you would dream of for any Jewish child!’ He inquired into the wellbeing of the family, he knew more about the smaller twigs of the family trees than Mother Feigele, drank a glass of tea and then another, told the story of the stupid coachman who has his horse stolen by the gypsy, wiped his face, got up to go, sat down again and then said quite casually, ‘And your daughter, Frau Meijer? Soon to be twenty, if I remember correctly, and lovely as a flower. Quite the mamme, may my tongue fall from my mouth if I tell a lie.’ That he didn’t seem to notice Mimi, who was also sitting in the kitchen, was part of the game.
Golde, familiar with the rules, affirmed how glad she was that Mimi wasn’t yet thinking of marrying, she thanked God for it every day. ‘I don’t know how I would cope without her, she is such a help to me and so gifted at everything to do with housekeeping.’ Then she launched into a hymn of praise for Mimi’s skills at cooking and sewing, a hymn in certain respects at odds with what Mimi normally heard on the subject. But how does the saying go? You don’t shout in the marketplace, you bring your goose back home.
Abraham Singer sat on his chair like a doll, his feet far above the floor, and listened to the whole thing from below. He confirmed to Golde that she was very lucky, indeed that she was bentshed by heaven in having such a sensible daughter, there were too many girls who couldn’t wait to come under the chuppah, he could name examples, more than one, in which it had not ended well at all.
Then he drank another glass of tea, told the story of the three pedlars who fall into the stream, laughed, wiped his face, rose to go, said, ‘On the other hand…’ and sat down again.
‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘I did happen to hear something, and I’m a curious person, what can I do, may it not be held against me. There is said to be a family, very, very bekovedik people, with a son, how should I put it, an only son, a pearl of a person.’
‘Who?’ asked Golde, but Abraham Singer would not have been so successful in his trade had he not had two particular abilities: hearing everything that might be useful to him, and ignoring everything that did not fit his plans.
‘But he’s supposed to be clever, so I have heard,’ he went on, ‘a real Talmud chochem. And a very practical person, too. Not like one of those Talmud students who can’t button up their trousers without first looking it up in a sefer.’