Salomon hadn’t seen his wife as happy and lost in herself for ages, and that did him good too. He was even more talkative than usual and told the stories he always told when he was in a good mood: the one about the farmer he had told that in Jewish byres the cows had to be fed with matzohs at Pesach, and who had asked in all seriousness if that didn’t spoil the milk, and the one about the goyish cattle trader who refused to believe that the cow they were trading had only calved once, and whom he finally persuaded with the words, ‘May my tochus go blind if I tell a lie!’ and who had actually believed that the tochus was a relative and not simply his backside.
Janki laughed long and loud about each of those stories, which made Salomon like him more and more.
That the bridal couple talked very little to one another no one noticed — except perhaps for Chanele. But she kept having to jump up and attend to something urgent in the kitchen.
Salomon made Janki — ‘Now that you are yourself a balebos, you will have to practise!’ — say the table blessing, and even tried to find the right notes when Janki sang quite different tunes during their communal singing from the ones they were used to in Endingen. Afterwards Salomon stretched pointedly and explained that the old people — ‘Isn’t that so, Golde?’ — had to go and lie down for a while now, that heavy food and everything, the young ones, he was quite sure, would — ‘Isn’t that so, Janki?’ — be quite capable of passing their time without them. When Golde didn’t come to the stairs with him quickly enough, he admonished her to hurry with a ‘Nu!’.
Chanele had closed the kitchen door, whether for the sake of discretion or for other reasons; Janki and Mimi were alone in the drawing room. They were still sitting at the table, which had been cleared of dishes, but whose white tablecloth, a post-feast menu, listed all the delicacies that Golde had prepared for today, in hieroglyphics of sauce-stains and crumbs.
Mimi pushed her chair closer, until Janki could have put his arm around her waist without stretching. He didn’t seem to notice the opportunity, or perhaps, even though it didn’t quite seem part of his character, he was simply shy. She let her head drop onto his shoulder and closed her eyes. Janki made a movement that raised her hopes, but he had only been making himself more comfortable in his chair. Anne-Kathrin was right: men were like little boys, you had to show them the way.
Without opening her eyes, just pressing her head more firmly into the hollow formed by his shoulder and his neck, she started speaking, her lips on his skin, so that he could feel her voice more than he could hear it. ‘Oh, Rodolphe,’ she said, ‘Rodolphe, Rodolphe, Rodolphe.’
‘Pardon me?’ asked Janki.
She straightened up and let her curls brush his cheek. ‘Do you love your Mimi just a teeny bit?’
‘Of course,’ said Janki. There was something in his voice that Mimi took for arousal. Chanele, who had been able to observe Janki very precisely for a few weeks, would have described it as impatience.
‘I love you too,’ said Mimi and pursed her lips.
‘Right,’ said Janki, as one rounds off a not particularly important point in a business discussion. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘At last!’ thought Mimi. The clothes were ordered and the sheitel well on its way. Now it was time for the other thing that she always flicked so eagerly through Anne-Kathrin’s books to find.
‘It’s like this,’ said Janki. ‘I’ve thought about everything very hard, over and over again.’
‘Yes?’ said Mimi.
‘It’s not going to work,’ said Janki.
‘What?’
‘It’s not going to work at all if you don’t work in the shop.’
12
Not that Chanele was listening. As Mimi would have said, certainement pas. But she was busy in the kitchen, the kitchen was the place where she belonged, where she would always belong now, as long as she lived; she was a sensible person and she didn’t dream of impossible things. She had come into the world to wash the dishes, she had come to terms with it once and for all, anything else was pointless woolgathering, pie in the sky. She wasn’t in the kitchen to enjoy herself, certainly not, and if those two couldn’t keep their argument any quieter, that was their problem. Mimi and Janki weren’t exactly yelling at each other, you couldn’t say that, but if you didn’t exactly plug your ears — and why should Chanele have had to do that? Was it her fault if the wall between parlour and kitchen wasn’t any thicker? If you weren’t as deaf as old Schmarje Braunschweig, then you were practically forced to listen to the two of them hissing at each other. If that was the tone that young couples in love adopted with each other, then Chanele was glad, oh yes, really glad, that she had decided once and for all to have nothing more to do with men, they were as much use as a loaf of bread at Pesach.
Those two, you didn’t have to listen at the wall to hear them, were arguing about whether Mimi was to be a housewife after the wedding, or a member of staff at the shop. Janki tried his well-practised sales patter at first, describing the joys of such shared activity as enticingly as he would have described an as yet untailored jacket to his customers. Mimi, for her part, reacted with the same childishly wheedling voice that she had always used when she wanted to wrap her parents, particularly Salomon, around her finger, she was entirely the helpless little girl who couldn’t understand what the big bad world wanted of her. When that didn’t work, she moved on to a tone of insulted injury, a sudden switch with which Chanele was all too familiar. She had actually thought that Jean had asked for her hand out of love — she still called him Jean, but she now spoke the name with a sarcastic undertone — and now she discovered that he hadn’t been after a wife at all, just a cheap serving wench, a Jewish bishge, but she was too good for that, far too good, and she never wanted to hear another word on the subject. Janki answered with numbers, he talked about takings and running costs, and paced back and forth as he did so. You didn’t have to have your ear to the wall to notice that; his footsteps could be clearly heard even in the kitchen, firm and regular, without the weekday limp that he had adopted for the benefit of his clientele. ‘She’s going to cry in a minute,’ thought Chanele, and sure enough, she could already here Mimi sniffing as she had done even as a little girl when she threatened to lose a battle for a doll or the last piece of Shabbos cake. His demands were causing her pain, Mimi wailed, she had really expected better from her Rodolphe — ‘What Rudolf?’ thought Chanele — she had thought he didn’t have the soul of a grocer like all the others, the disappointment was crushing her soul now, and he couldn’t want his little Mimi to be unhappy, could he, he couldn’t want that?
It was at that point that he began to hiss, at which the words ‘spoilt little girl’ and ‘you can’t do business sitting on your tochus’ were uttered, and Chanele in her kitchen, probably unlike Janki, was not at all surprised when Mimi abruptly stopped crying and hissed back that a wife wasn’t a commodity that you could buy and then do with what you liked until the end of time, and that people who had come here with nothing on their backs, with nothing at all, were in no position to redraft the laws of the land.
If one belongs once and for all in the kitchen, if that is the lot that one has been given in life, then one should do one’s work thoroughly, so Chanele decided that the plates that she had just washed weren’t clean enough, and started all over again from the beginning, purely out of a sense of duty, not, for instance, so that someone who came charging furiously out of the parlour into the kitchen, would find her at work and wouldn’t find themselves wondering whether she might have taken the slightest interest in what was happening in the next room. Certainement pas, isn’t that so, Mimi?’