‘I can manage on my own,’ said Janki.
‘Of course, said Chanele. ‘Who would dare to doubt it?’
‘You know I’m moving out because of you,’ said Janki.
‘Not because of Mimi? After all, you were engaged to her.’
‘Because I hadn’t understood…’
‘Ah,’ said Chanele, very busy with a shirt. ‘And now you’ve understood?’
‘Except you don’t want to,’ said Janki.
Chanele gave a strangely incomplete movement of her head; it was impossible to tell whether it was a nod or a shake. ‘No,’ she said at last, ‘I don’t. But…’
‘But?’
‘Does it say anywhere in the Schulchan Orech that you always have to do what you want?’
Janki reached for her hands, which were at that moment laying out a shirt. Now it hung between them by its sleeves, a child forcing its way into its parents’ conversation.
‘Does that mean…?’
Chanele looked at him for a long time, two sceptical eyes under brows that no longer met in the middle. Then she freed her hands, turned away and smoothed the shirt on the bed, again and again, even though there was no need.
‘You could have come to me a second time,’ she said.
‘Then would you have said yes?’
‘You know,’ said Chanele and unfolded the shirt, which she had already laid folded on the bed. ‘I have no nedinye. I have no family. I have no place where I really belong. Can I afford to turn down a job I’m offered just like that?’
‘I haven’t offered you a job,’ Janki said furiously.
‘That was how it seemed to me.’
‘Just because I said I needed someone who knows how to muck in?’
‘I have nothing against work.’
‘What do you expect me to do? Declare my love?’
‘Not any more.’
‘Then what am I supposed to…?’
‘Nothing at all.’
Janki sat down on the bed, in the middle of a freshly folded shirt, and struck his forehead with both fists. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘I know.’ Chanele nodded several times. ‘You’re stupid.’ Then she sat down beside him, hunched her shoulders as if slipping into a dress a size too small for her, and said very quietly: ‘But we can live with that.’ And rested a hand on his.
‘Can I kiss you?’ asked Janki after a long moment.
‘No,’ said Chanele. ‘Maybe later. We’ll see.’
When Janki announced that he was going to marry Chanele, Salomon just said, ‘Nu!’ which in this case meant: ‘Nothing in this house surprises me any more.’
Golde almost forgot to hug them both, because while Janki, less eloquent than they were used to hearing him, was still delivering his contorted explanation, it was clear to her that she would now have to prepare for a double chassene, a task whose like had never been seen in Endingen before.
Mimi’s reaction to the news, and this might not necessarily have been expected, was friendly, practically relieved. ‘Now I know at last,’ she later said to Anne-Kathrin ‘that it’s not because of me that Janki… I have, without knowing it, been nurturing…’
‘… a viper at your bosom!’ Anne-Kathrin, who had read the same books, completed the phrase.
The two chassenes were to take place on the same day, which struck Salomon as only sensible. When the wedding was being planned, Mimi insisted that Janki and Chanele — ‘It’s unthinkable otherwise!’ — come under the chuppah ahead of her, and told only Anne-Kathrin the reason: ‘All the people will stay there to wait for me and Pinchas, and the others will be standing outside after their wedding, and nobody will be there to congratulate them!’
Janki had already decided to give up on the house with the Red Shield, and was pleasantly surprised when he learned that Chanele was to have a nedinye after all — and what a nedinye! Chanele even cried when Salomon told her, which was extremely unpleasant for the cattle-trader, who had never known her to do anything of the kind. To complicate matters even further, he didn’t tell them that the sum was only as high as it was because Janki had negotiated badly the first time.
In such a short time a second trousseau could not be supplied, but they made do. ‘Because of us,’ Golde said, ‘they should not lie on their bare tochus in Baden.’ The garconnière was cancelled even before Janki had moved in, and Janki wrote to Guebwiller about the furniture that was still in storage with the coachman. When it was delivered, it was shabbier than he remembered, but for the time being — six thousand francs isn’t the same as twelve, after all — they would have to do. Chanele made curtains, and in the end it was not a flat where you could impress elegant friends, but certainly one in which you could live.
Chanele had made it very clear that she wanted to have a parlour and not a drawing room, and the tantalus now stood on the old table from Guebwiller. If the curtains — not made of Shantung silk, but not exactly rags either — were open and the sun shone into the right corner, the yellow liquid gleamed like gold.
‘One day everything in our house will be as elegant as that,’ said Janki.
‘Make Shabbos with it,’ said Chanele.
On 17 December, two days after Chanukah, the chuppah was set up in Endingen synagogue.
It was a cold day, the coldest of the year. Anyone who wanted to be there — and who would have missed the double event — had to fight their way through heavy drifts of snow on the way to shul. The musicians who were to have collected the brides from home had appeared on time, but fearing for his instrument the violinist refused to play in the street, and the trumpeter and trombonist could produce nothing more than a gloomy rhythm, to which people could only slouch, and not march cheerily and proudly along.
Mimi and Chanele walked along side by side, and if anyone had been standing watching them by the side of the road — but no one was, it was far too cold for that — he would have taken them for the best of friends. Over the past few weeks they had treated one another with exquisite politeness, and only once, when they went to the ritually cleansing immersion bath at the mikvah, and met one another on neutral ground, they had talked of their true concerns. But no one had witnessed that conversation apart from Mother Feigele, who liked to make herself useful at the mikvah because it was always well heated, and Mother Feigele was deaf.
Mimi set one foot in front of the other in her expensive new boots, thinking as she did so about a historical novel that Anne-Kathrin had lent her, the story of the queens Elizabeth and Mary Stuart. They had walked along side by side and nodded graciously to the people, except that one of them was going to the scaffold and didn’t yet know. ‘I’m glad I’m getting Pinchas and not that chap Janki who wandered in from nowhere,’ thought Mimi, and almost persuaded herself to feel sorry for Chanele.
During the first wedding she had to wait in a side room, next to a box of battered Holy Scriptures waiting to be buried with the corpse at the next levaya. A chair had been brought for her, but she thought it was dusty so she chose instead to stand and shiver in her white dress.
The noises in the synagogue hall could be heard only as a distant murmur, and it was impossible to make out voices or even individual words, and yet Mimi followed the sequence of the ritual in all its smallest details.
First the bride was led under the chuppah. As Chanele had not a single relative in the village, two women from the community had undertaken this task of honour: Hulda Moos, who always liked to push her way to the front at mitzvahs, and Red Moische’s wife. The prayers and songs could not be distinguished from one another, but Mimi could still have spoken and sung along with them. It was in any case only a kind of rehearsal before they would then sound, with the same words and the same tunes, for her.