Chanele’s transformation, if one wished to give a starting point to this slow process, began with the opening of the Modern Emporium at the House of the Red Sign, or in fact with a conversation that she had with Golde shortly before it opened. Old Frau Meijer — that was what she called herself, and she was proud of her mother-in-law title — hadn’t come to Baden because of Janki and Chanele that time, but to take the train to see Mimi in Zurich. However, she had found time to be shown around the still unfinished sales rooms by Chanele. She had stopped in front of a mirror newly fixed to the wall, sucked her lower lip deep into her mouth and thoughtfully considered herself and Chanele.
‘You need different clothes,’ Golde said at last.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re dressed like an employee. And you’re the owner.’
‘I am?’
‘The shop’s being set up with your nedinye.’
‘But that doesn’t make me the boss,’ said Chanele and Golde laughed.
‘Of course not. You must let your husband have his head. But who is the brains in that head?’ She beckoned Chanele over with a bent index finger as if to whisper a secret in her ear, but just looked at her and spread her arms, as one does to emphasise the irrefutable conclusion of a long argument. ‘Nu?’ she said, and the impersonation was so perfect that Chanele couldn’t help laughing out loud.
‘In our house it was Salomon’s head that decreed the rules,’ Golde said. ‘Things will be the same for you. And that’s why you need different clothes.’
That had been the start. Without the new shop Chanele would probably never have become Madame Meijer.
Janki, who also saw himself as something of an artist where business matters were concerned, had only thought in the most general terms about the possibilities for further development that a wider clientele would involve, he fantasised numbers, and he liked those numbers, but it was Chanele who knew from her own experience the everyday life and the needs of the people who would buy at the new shop. Often enough she had suffered from the compulsion of having to talk her way at length into a discount of five rappen or a handful of free corks, so she was the first to see to it — later no one could imagine things being otherwise, but back in the 1870s it represented an unheard-of innovation — that all goods, without exception, were sold at an unchangeable price fixed in writing, so that from the outset there was no bargaining in the shop, no ‘Jewing’, as it was generally known. ‘For every customer delighted with a good deal, you will get three who feel cheated,’ she told Janki. ‘And besides; we can’t leave it up to each individual assistant to set the price from one case to the next.’ But the argument with which she most thoroughly convinced him was a quite different one: ‘I’ve heard that this is what they do now in the smartest shops in London.’
Furthermore, and this too was an unheard-of innovation at the time, the Emporium was the first establishment in the place that employed saleswomen as well as salesmen. Admittedly female assistants had not been anything unusual in the past, but they had their place, as seamstresses or ironing ladies, only ever in the back rooms. Now young women physically stood there behind the counters, in the uniform that Chanele had designed for them: a black dress with a narrow white collar, and a pale grey apron. When she herself went to work — and increasingly she felt that only what she did outside the house was real work — Chanele was dressed very similarly, although of course without the apron. Instead of the collar her dress had a white trim, no longer cambric but the best Brussels lace, affixed to which, like a kind of officer’s flash, there was a brooch with a cameo that Golde had given to her as a wedding present.
If Chanele liked to employ women it had nothing to do with emancipation, a word that might have been known in Zurich, but certainly not in Baden. Women’s wages were lower, that was one very practical reason, and the other: there are lots of things that women would never buy from men. What one might once have bought from a familiar door-to-door saleswoman was now suddenly available, with the same discretion but in a much wider selection, at the House of the Red Sign, and even in its first year of business the Modern Emporium sold considerable quantities of embroidered ladies’ stockings and above all corsets, which in their simplest form could be had for as little as a franc. Janki was glad of the good profits he made in such everyday articles as children’s pinafores or knitted striped socks for ladies, but those things were not the ones that really interested him. It would have been extremely embarrassing for him to walk through the shop and have a lady customer ask him about dress shields or waistbands.
So it was that the French Store and the Modern Emporium gradually became two very different shops, his and hers, each one with its own very particular character. On Vordere Metzggasse everything was French and elegant; Monsieur Jean Meijer held court among select fabrics, carried out sales as an act of mercy and received the money of his lady customers as a tribute quite naturally owed to him. Sometimes, and these were often the most lucrative afternoons, he didn’t even open the curtains over the shelves, he only talked for an hour or two with the ladies of the town and, if heavily coaxed, related this or that experience from the Battle of Sedan.
In the House with the Red Sign, on the other hand, they got straight to the point, they talked not about heroic deeds but about indienne or muslin, they sold fabrics promptly by the metre or, for the older ladies, by the ell, and treated city women and villagers with the same routine politeness. Chanele — no: Madame Meijer — ran a tight ship, and woe to the assistant who dared to be sniffy when dealing with a customer from the country just because she wanted to buy nothing more than an antimacassar or a piece of Russian braid. ‘We will have to gather everyone together again,’ Madame Meijer made a mental note, ‘and remind them that the smallest purchase is as important to us as the largest.’
Chanele ended her round and went back to her office, a modest room, smaller than that of Ziltener the accountant. The decoration was spartan, like the captain’s cabin on a warship; there was only one shelf for files, and a plain writing-desk scattered with old ink stains, the last of the pieces of furniture that had come from Guebwiller back then. Here too she had developed a little rituaclass="underline" every evening, as a final task, before she went home, she turned the little cardboard discs on her calendar so that they were ready for the next day. As she turned the ninth of May 1893 into the tenth, and a Tuesday into a Wednesday, the town clock struck the quarter-hour and Chanele thought, ‘I must get a move on. Janki will go quite meshuga with waiting.’ At the same time, spurred on by the same chimes, Madame Meijer was considering: ‘Communion wreath. With cloth flowers and embroidery. That would certainly go down well at this time of year.’
‘Excuse me.’ The knocking had been so quiet that Chanele had at first ignored it. A woman in the spartan uniform of the Emporium was standing in the doorway.
Mathilde Lutz, née Mathilde Vogelsang, had been the very first saleswoman that Chanele had employed more than twenty years before. Now, with prematurely grey hair in a severe bun, she looked strict and superior, particularly when she put on the pince-nez that was fastened to her dress with a black velvet band. Back then — could it really have been more than twenty years ago — she had been a lively and, more particularly, a very pretty young girl, with a saucy little beauty spot on her cheek, and many a male customer had come into the shop just for her, on the pretext of having to buy something for his wife. She had soon left the company to marry, but had come back after her husband’s early death, no longer at the counter — there were younger girls there now — but as a kind of governess whose job it was to ensure discipline and good behaviour among the female employees.