‘Nu, so be it, part of the leftovers.’
Mimi pushed away her crumbled cake. ‘I don’t know why you all like it so much. It tastes ordinaire.’ She spoke the word with lips pursed, to stress the Frenchness of the word.
Golde took the plate, looked at it darkly — ‘the waste!’ her expression said — and put it with the other crockery that Chanele would later wash up. ‘Where are you off to tomorrow?’ she asked her husband, not out of genuine interest, but because an eyshes chayil asks the right questions.
‘To Degermoos. The young farmer, Stalder, has said he wants to talk to me. I can imagine what it’s about. He’s running out of hay. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him he’s putting too many cows out on his poor land. Now he wants me to buy them back. But I’m not buying. Who needs cows when the grass isn’t growing yet?’
‘And that’s why you’re going? Not to do a deal?’
‘Not this deal. There’s someone in Vogelsang with cow-pest in his herd. He has too much hay. I’ll tell Stalder, and he can stock up.’
‘What do you get out of it?’
‘Nothing today. And perhaps nothing tomorrow, either. But the day after tomorrow…’ Salomon ran his fingers through his sideburns, because of the cake-crumbs and because he was pleased with himself. ‘Sooner or later he’ll have a beheimes to sell, and it’ll be an animal that I can use. I’ll make him an offer, and he’ll take it because he’ll think to himself: “The Jew with the brolly is a decent fellow.” And then I will do my deal.’
The business with the brolly was this: whenever Salomon Meijer travelled across the country he carried with him a fat black umbrella, tied at the top so that the fabric puffed out like a bag. He used the umbrella as a walking stick, pressed it firmly down on to the ground with each step and left an unmistakeable trail on muddy paths or in the snow: the impressions of two hobnailed soles and to the right of them a row of holes as regular as the ones a tidy farmer’s wife would make when planting beans. The special thing about the umbrella, the thing people talked about, was that Salomon never opened it, whatever the weather. Even when the rain was cascading down as if the time had come for a new Noah and a new Ark, Salomon just drew his hat lower over his forehead, if it got very bad, pulled the tails of his long coat over his head and walked on, leaning on the umbrella and drilling the tip into the ground with every second step, so that the rain collected in a row of little lakes behind him. He was known because of this around Endingen, and laughed at because of it too, and if, like red-haired Moische, he had had a shop-sign painted, to bring customers to the right place it would have had to say not ‘Cattle-trading Sal. Meijer’, but ‘The Jew with the Brolly’.
Salomon belched pleasurably, as if after the big Shabbos sude, when it is practically a mitzvah, a god-pleasing act, to eat too much. Mimi pulled a face and murmured something to herself that was probably French but certainly contemptuous. Salomon took a pinch from his snuff-box, screwed up his nose and contorted his face into a grimace and finally sneezed, loudly and with a great sense of relief. ‘Now there’s only one thing I need,’ he said, and looked around expectantly. Chanele, since they would probably go on sitting in the kitchen for a while, had gone into the parlour to fetch the second paraffin lamp, and now she drew an earthenware bottle from one apron pocket, a pewter mug from the other, and set them both in front of him. ‘She can do magic like the Witch of Endor,’ Salomon said contentedly and poured himself a drink.
Then the conversation in the kitchen had fallen asleep, as a child suddenly falls asleep in the middle of a game. Chanele washed the crockery in the big brown wooden bucket; it clattered as if in the distance. Golde put the dried plates back in the cupboard, took the few steps individually for each plate, back and forth, a dance without a partner, to which Salomon, eyes closed, droned a tune, more out of repletion than musicality. Mimi reproachfully brushed invisible crumbs from her dressing gown and wondered whether she shouldn’t have chosen a different fabric; she had only taken this one because the shopkeeper had called it ‘dove-grey’, such a beautiful, soft, gleaming word. Dove-grey.
At the house next door — which was actually the same house yet a different one because the law demanded as much, at the other entrance of the house, then, there was a sudden hammering on the door, impatient and violent, as one knocks at the midwife’s door when someone is entering the world, or at the door of the chevra, the funeral fraternity, when someone is leaving it. It was not a time of day when people in Endingen paid a visit, either to Jews or to goyim. In the other half of the house, with its own front door and its own stairs, to meet the requirements of the law according to which Christians and Jews were not allowed to live in the same house, their landlord lived, the tailor Oggenfuss, with his wife and three children, peaceful people if you knew how to take them. They were good neighbours, which meant that they benignly ignored one another. The death of Uncle Melnitz, and all the mourners who had come to the house for seven days, had gone assiduously unnoticed by the Oggenfuss household, with the practised blindness of people who live closer together than they would really like to. And even now, when something unusual was going on, something practically sensational by Endingen standards, in the Meijers’ kitchen they merely looked quizzically at one another, and already Salomon shrugged his shoulders and said ‘So!’ — which in this case meant something like, ‘They can break the door down if they want to, it has nothing to do with us.’
Footsteps were heard next door, a restless to-ing and fro-ing, from which, if one had been curious, one might have worked out that someone who had already gone to bed was looking for a candle, a spill, to light it from the embers of the oven fire, a shawl, to cover their night-shirt, then the shutter clattered against the wall, a noise that really belonged to early morning, and Oggenfuss, as unfriendly as fearful people are in unfamiliar situations, asked what was so urgent and what sort of behaviour was that, dragging people out of bed in the middle of the night.
A strange, hoarse voice, interrupted by a bad cough, gave an unintelligible answer. Oggenfuss, switching from Aargau dialect to High German, replied. The stranger repeated his sentence, from which one could now make out the words ‘please’ and ‘visit’, but in such an unusual accent that Mimi said with delight, ‘It’s a Frenchman.’
‘Sha!’ said Golde. She stood there with an empty bowl in her hand, in the open kitchen door, where the corridor acted as an amplifier, so that even if one wasn’t curious, one could hear everything going on in the street. But all that came from outside now was the coughing of the nocturnal visitor. Oggenfuss said something final, and a shutter upstairs was closed. Then Frau Oggenfuss could be heard, her words impossible to make out but her tone urgent. After a pause the stairs creaked next door, although no individual footsteps could be heard, the sound made when someone wears slippers, the front door was opened, and Oggenfuss said in the suffering voice of someone forced to show politeness that he doesn’t feeclass="underline" ‘So? Who are you? And what do you want?’
The strange man had stopped coughing, but still said nothing. In the Meijers’ kitchen no one moved. When Salomon talked about it later, he said it was as if Joshua had made the moon stand still over the Valley of Ajalon. Chanele had taken a plate from the bowl; the dish-cloth had stopped in mid-air, and water dripped on the stone tiles. Mimi stared at a strand of hair that she had wrapped around her index finger, and Golde simply stood still, which was the most unusual thing of all, because Golde was otherwise always in motion.
And then the stranger had found his voice and said something that everyone in the kitchen understood.