Towards someone.
He hadn’t heard what the two of them had said to one another. They were speaking too quietly, and he was standing too far away. The gap in the hedge was directly behind the gazebo, and because of the boards that formed the back of the bench that ran around in a hexagon, one couldn’t have a complete view. But the kiss he had seen, it had been impossible to ignore, he had seen the look of surprise on Pinchas’s face, and then the happy one, and the way his black hat tipped backwards and the way Mimi didn’t let go of him.
‘So that’s how it is,’ he had said, and now, in retrospect, he thought he might have phrased it better.
Mimi was crying; perhaps she was crying. She had thrown her hands to her face and sat crouching at her end of the bench, a child awaiting a smack. Pinchas had immediately leapt to his feet and placed himself in front of Mimi, but she had pushed him away, and now he was standing forlornly in the middle of the gazebo, exactly where the little table had been when they had written their article that time. He stood there, his tongue in the gap in his teeth, and looked as if he were about to launch into a speech. But he said only, ‘It’s my fault, Janki, all mine,’ and Mimi lowered her hands for a moment, said, ‘Oh, shut up, Pinchas!’ and disappeared behind the cover of her hands once more.
And then the schoolmaster emerged from between the rosebushes and the elder bush, in his shirt sleeves and with a big green apron, beamed across the whole of his sweaty face and said, ‘Ah, Monsieur Meijer! Dear young friend! You I had not expected in the antechamber. Emilia Galotti. And Fräulein Meijer! And Herr… Yes, yes, the later the evening, the lovelier the guests. Welcome to my Tusculum! Even though you, I fear, are waiting here not for me but for my daughter. I will fetch her at once. One second and she will be there. I go, I go. Look how I go. Swifter than an arrow from the Tartar’s bow!’
13
It was a small event that made Janki’s decision final, an event without any real significance of its own.
That Sabbath afternoon, after a very embarrassing encounter with Anne-Kathrin, he had come home with Mimi. Salomon had nodded knowingly to Golde when the two of them came in, and pointedly just happened to whistle to himself the song of the bride and groom, ‘Chossen, Kalleh, Mazel tov’. That chossen and kalleh hardly exchanged a word with one another Salomon put down to a natural bashfulness, one could after all imagine that the two of them had not just chatted and talked about the weather on their walk together. From that point onwards Mimi and Janki were so strikingly polite with one another, saying ‘Another drop of coffee?’ and ‘Will it bother you if I open the window?’ that Golde whispered to Salomon that there was nothing lovelier than young happiness, and she could watch the two of them for hours.
A post horse trots to the next stop without a coachman, and so on Monday Janki was in Baden again, he opened his shop on time and smiled politely as he served his customers. He even went as agreed to view a flat, diagonally opposite the House of the Red Shield, where one would be able to look right across from the drawing room to the new shop windows. The owner of the house, a certain Herr Bäschli, was an old man in a grandfatherly frock coat, and had the habit of rubbing his hands constantly together, not in a circular, soapy way, but with his fingers outstretched as if it was winter and he just couldn’t make himself warm. He had a hardware shop, as he called it, on the ground floor of the same house, more of a cabinet of curiosities, with shelves full of vases and paintings, but also old butter churns and broken spinning wheels. After the viewing — ‘Think about it in peace, take your time, there’s no hurry’ — he insisted that Janki look around the shop with him, anyone starting a new household needed all sorts of things, and many a one had found quite unexpected objects in his shop, things they had been looking for all along without even being aware of it.
Janki itched to be back at Vordere Metzggasse, where, even though the early afternoon was usually a very quiet time, a customer might be waiting, but out of politeness he did as Herr Bäschli wished. First of all the old man offered him a pair of brass lamps, shaped like Ionic columns, their flutes still stuck with the wax of long extinguished candles. ‘A Jewish household needs candelabras,’ Herr Bäschli said with the pride of a scholar who is finally able to apply a bit of obscure book-learning to everyday life. Even the painting of a bearded man, so darkened as to be almost unrecognisable — ‘It could be a rabbi!’ — failed to attract Janki’s interest. He was about to take his leave, when Herr Bäschli assured him, rubbing his hands together the while, that he still had something very special, something that he didn’t show to every customer, it came from a very elegant house and Janki absolutely had to look at it. From a wardrobe painted in the rustic style — ‘Also for sale, but I don’t think it’s something for you’ — he took a strange silver device in which a crystal bottle was enclosed. ‘A tantalus,’ said Herr Bäschli proudly. ‘I don’t know if you have ever interested yourself in the Greek myths. Tantalus was the man who, standing in water, had to suffer thirst for ever.’ He moved the enclosed bottle back and forth in front of the window. It was almost entirely filled with a shimmering, gold liquid that started to glow in the sunlight. ‘A decent drop, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Herr Bäschli. ‘Far too decent to let any Tom, Dick or Harry get anywhere near. That’s why there’s this seal up at the top, do you see? However thirsty your maid might be, she won’t be having a drink from this. Only someone with the key can take the bottle out.’ He set the tantalus down in front of Janki and rubbed his hands still more violently together. ‘That is the little catch of the matter. There is no key. But it also looks so very decorative, on a sideboard or in a cabinet. I will give you a very good price. A particularly good price because, to be honest, I imagine it must be terrible to spend a lifetime looking at something that one can never have.’
That was the moment, the precise moment, when Janki made his decision. Perhaps there was a logical connection between the tantalus that he bought from Herr Bäschli without haggling, and what happened next, but Janki didn’t think about it. He was a person who was only really alive when he was in a hurry, and he couldn’t remember ever being in such a hurry as this.
He didn’t open his shop, he just went there for a moment to put the tantalus in the middle of the counter, he didn’t even leave a message for that lump from the village who would wait outside the locked door, waiting in vain for his cleaning supervision. ‘I will pay her for her trouble anyway,’ he decided. That didn’t matter right now.
On the country road his walking stick felt like a nuisance. You couldn’t really take it round with you if you had no time to limp. Even though he was walking more quickly than usual, on the way he saw only things that had never attracted his attention before. One mossy end of an old border stone between two communities protruded from the ground; one could imagine a column sprouting from it, like asparagus. A garden fence, with a swallow sitting on each pole, smartly dressed petitioners in an official’s antechamber. A nut tree, broad and massive, that reminded him of his grandfather sitting over his tomes at the table in the window, always knowing everything.
Untidy clouds drifted with him, and seemed to be in just as much of a hurry as he was himself, and in between them the autumn sun, faint now, was trying with one final effort to warm the world again, an old man realising far too late what he has missed in life. Hanging in the air was a smell of burnt wood; the hearths seemed already to be practising for the winter, which would very soon be there.
The journey had never been so quick. He must, without noticing, almost have been running, because when he saw the roofs of the village in front of him he was out of breath. He tried to collect himself, to find a posture corresponding to his decision, he used his walking stick again and even limped a little. By the time he arrived in front of the house with the two doors, he was Jean Meijer once more, a matter-of-fact businessman who knew how to make decisions and, if necessary, correct mistakes.