‘I can go again,’ said Salomon. ‘It isn’t all that far to Endingen anyway.’
‘You know I wouldn’t allow that.’
Arthur, who had a keen sense for things unsaid, looked anxiously back and forth between his father and Uncle Salomon.
‘Of course you must stay,’ said Janki. ‘Although in fact today…’
‘Important visitors?’
‘A few business colleagues. Nothing special. Just a sandwich.’
‘For which I’ve spent three days standing at the stove,’ Christine grumbled into her soup pot.
‘“Guest” is an interesting word, by the way,’ said Salomon. ‘In Hebrew it has the numerical value of two hundred and fifteen, exactly the same amount as…’
‘Not now. Please.’ Janki had great trouble keeping the polite smile on his face. ‘I have a lot of preparation to do. And you need to…’
‘What?’
‘You aren’t going to sit down at our table like that, are you?’
Salomon gripped the flaps of his old-fashioned frock coat and turned once in a circle on tripping footsteps. ‘This is as handsome as I get,’ he said.
‘I’ll fetch you a new shirt from the shop.’ Janki had come into the kitchen after all. ‘To what do we owe the honour of this visit, in fact?’
‘I nearly forgot,’ said Salomon. ‘I’ve brought a letter. For Chanele.’
16
She must have run home five or ten times in the course of the day to give Christine one final instruction for the kitchen, and then one very last one; to be sure that Louisli, the inexperienced new serving girl, didn’t try to polish the precious silver knives with scouring powder, as had actually happened in Mimi’s Zurich house; to put out the big damask tablecloth for the two hired servants who helped out at all the big dinners in Baden, and entrust them with the key to the porcelain cupboard; to check this and correct that, because the formal events that Janki organised twice a year for his goyish business associates were battles that you could only fight successfully if you took into account every eventuality and every possible setback from the outset, and had prepared the correct strategy in advance. During the battle itself, once the guests had arrived, one had to be able to direct one’s troops from the general’s hillock at the end of the table with nothing more than the twitch of a finger and a nod of the head, and at the same time smile without meaning it, chat without saying anything and stress repeatedly that you hadn’t gone to any trouble, and that what you were serving up was little more than a round of sandwiches.
If it had been possible, Chanele would have crossed these evenings out of the diary once and for all, not because they caused her too much trouble, but because she thought they were pointless, the mimicked ritual of a society to which one would never fully belong. It was a disguise, a masquerade that even involved her kitchen, because Chanele’s house was of course run on kosher lines, and given that there was a prohibition on mixing meat and milk, one had to summon up a lot of imagination to find something appropriate to go with the butter sauces customary on such occasions.
She had run home at least ten times — luckily they only lived opposite, and only had to cross the little square between the Weite and the Mittlere Gasse — and ten times she had hurried back to the shop. To their shop, even though Janki’s name was over the door in gold letters, Propriétaire Jean Meijer, and even though Herr Ziltener, the accountant, only ever said about any decision that affected them, ‘I will suggest that to the boss.’ But where everything else was concerned, Ziltener was anxiously meticulous, down to the tiniest detail; satirically minded commentators even said that he read his punctual ‘good morning’ from the paper frills that he wore to protect his sleeves. For all other colleagues there was no doubt who was really in charge at the Modern Drapery: Madame Meijer, and no one else.
Madame Meijer liked to be the last one left in the shop in the evening. She needed those undisturbed moments, she needed them more than ever. Chanele loved to stroll around the deserted sales rooms with the blouses laid neatly in piles, and shelves full of ribbons and haberdashery, here nudging a lady’s hat on its wooden stand to exactly the right angle, there putting a forgotten tape measure back in its correct place behind the counter. She enjoyed those secret minutes, the only ones in the day that belonged to her alone, a young girl behind the bolted door, opening the trousseau for the hundredth time, counting the bedclothes and running her hand over the cambric undershirts. She had even ordered, or had Ziltener suggest to the boss, that the gas lamps were only ever to be turned off two hours after the close of business, a form of advertising, she had said by way of explanation, to signal to the customers that people in the shop went on working for them until late at night. You had to know how to deal with Janki.
Of course everyone in the company knew about that little foible the boss’s wife had, and anyone who had to work longer at the shop, perhaps because a curtain ordered for the following day had to be stitched in a hurry, or a delivery that had arrived late had to be unpacked, stayed in the workshop or the store-room, kept the door shut, and wouldn’t have dared to disturb Madame Meijer on her rounds.
Madame Meijer…
Chanele hadn’t slipped into the new role on the day of her wedding. When someone is recruited to the military, you can dress him up on the spot, but under his uniform he is still a civilian at first. Inner feeling chases after outward circumstances, and we have all seen examples when the two never catch up. During the initial phase of her marriage Chanele had behaved as if she had merely switched servitudes, from one Meijer house to another. She ran her household quietly and inconspicuously, and even right at the start, when there was no question of hiring a servant, there was never a pan left unscoured nor an oven door covered with soot. Chanele cooked, she baked, and then when she came to her husband’s table — still the old table, which Janki had had brought from Guebwiller, not the long, new one at which he would now entertain his guests — when she finally sat down, wherever she sat became the bottom of the table. Janki soon became used to issuing the mute commands that he had observed at Salomon’s house in Endingen, reached his hand out without a word when he wanted to have a plate passed to him, or, when he came into the house, simply dropped his coat on the floor when he came into the house. But what for the old Meijers had been a wordless interplay, more an intertwining of forces than a sequence of orders given and obeyed, was slightly off in the young couple, like a wheel set not quite precisely on its hub. However, Chanele never seemed to be bothered by Janki’s high-handed behaviour; at least she never rebelled against it.
She had also started to help out in the French Drapery Store again; it was as if she had never been away. She smiled politely and made tea, took the customers’ coats off when they came in and handed them their hatpins before they left, wore the brown dress with the cambric trim and never contradicted when her husband went on calling her Mademoiselle Hanna in front of the customers. He also used that name, incidentally, when they were on their own, he whispered it into her body in bed, and although she generally responded to his attentions more or less dutifully, as she would have swept a cabinet-maker’s workshop or harnessed a coachman’s horses, during those moments she felt something like the memory of a feeling, a tone of thought that goes on vibrating after you wake up, even though you have long since forgotten the dream that goes with it.
All in all the young Chanele, even more severely trained by the awareness of her dependency than by the model set by Golde, was a blameless wife. At the ‘Eshet chayil mi yimtza’ Janki could have smiled at her, as Salomon always smiled at Golde, but he repeated the old words — and even that only for the first few years — without meaning them. Only on one single point did Chanele refuse to obey her husband from the outset. However much he tried to persuade her, whether he tried flattery or argued the duty of keeping up appearances, which she now had to perform by his side: never again did she pluck her eyebrows. The dark line across her face remained, and the more she became Madame Meijer, the less imaginable she was without it.