Madame Meijer and Frau Lutz were not friends; a general has comrades among his officers, not friends. But they were about the same age, they had experienced the rise of the Emporium together and, even though they had never said as much, shared the conviction that the unpleasant sides of life could not be improved by complaining.
‘Excuse me,’ Frau Lutz said again. ‘I know you prefer to be alone at this time of day. But…’
‘What is it?’
Mathilde Lutz was not otherwise inclined to shyness, quite the contrary. When she surprised a young couple kissing or in an even more incriminating situation, she was not lost for words; her sharp tongue struck fear into the shop assistants. But now she shifted uncertainly, almost fearfully, from one foot to the other, as only the young salesgirls normally did when they had been caught committing a small act of theft, and had under threat of immediate dismissal been persuaded to deliver a confession.
‘I wanted… It’s…’
‘Nu?’ Sometimes without noticing, Madame Meijer was very like old Salomon.
‘We have known each other for a long time now, so I thought it better if I myself…’
‘What?’
‘You will find out, sooner or later.’
Chanele sat down, very carefully, as if she didn’t trust the chair. In the gas light, the ink stains on the writing desk looked like dead insects.
‘Mathilde,’ she said, and Frau Lutz, whom her boss had not addressed by her first name in over two decades, tilted her head to one side in embarrassment. It looked as if she wanted to be stroked. The beauty spot on her cheek, Chanele had never noticed it with such clarity, had grown over the years into a wart. ‘Mathilde, what am I about to find out?’
‘The men…’ In her embarrassment Frau Lutz had wrapped the velvet strap of her pince-nez as tightly around one finger as if she were trying to stem a haemorrhage. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. The good lord just made them that way. And Marie-Theres is really very pretty. The one from the blouse department, you know.’
‘I do know my employees,’ said Chanele, and immediately abandoned her dismissive tone. ‘Marie-Theres Furrer, is that right, Mathilde? What’s wrong with her?’
It was hard to believe, but severe Frau Lutz blushed.
‘Pregnant?’ asked Chanele.
‘Pregnant,’ Frau Lutz whispered, and the word came straight from Sodom and Gomorrah.
Chanele — at that moment she was without a doubt Chanele and not Madame Meijer — laughed with relief. ‘Bigger miracles have happened in the world.’
Frau Lutz did not join in with her laughter. ‘But it’s much worse than that,’ she said.
‘Twins?’ Chanele was still laughing.
‘The father. I’ve talked to Furrer, and she told me that the father…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m so sorry that I have to be the one to…’
‘Janki,’ Chanele said very quietly and was shocked to realise that she wasn’t surprised at all. Her husband hadn’t called her Mademoiselle Hanna for ages, and she had assumed it was inevitable that he didn’t always sleep alone on his business trips, and what the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over. But here in Baden, in his own shop… ‘Is it Janki?’ she asked more loudly.
Frau Lutz looked at her uncomprehendingly. For her, who had only ever known Monsieur Jean Meijer, the name was meaningless.
‘Is it my husband?’
Frau Lutz shook her head. ‘No, Madame Meijer. Of course not. Monsieur Meijer would never…’
Chanele waited for a sense of relief and couldn’t find it inside herself. ‘Then who is it?’
The velvet strap tore. The pince-nez fell the floor with a faint clatter and broke. Frau Lutz bent down to collect the splinters and whispered into the floorboards, ‘Young Herr François.’
‘Shmul?’ said Chanele.
17
‘Shmul!’ she would say. ‘François!’ she would say. ‘Did you even think about what that would mean for the company…?’
No, that would be wrong. He would just look at her, contemptuous and weary at the same time, eyebrows raised, with that polite smile that he was so good at hiding behind, that smile that she didn’t understand, and which frightened her, even though he was, after all, her own son, the smile of a man who has already lived a lot, when he was only…
Old enough to get a silly girl pregnant.
They would have to fire Marie-Theres Furrer.
No. That would make things even worse. They would have to take care of her, perhaps give her some money…
‘The Jews always do everything with their money,’ people would say. And if you didn’t offer them any, ‘The Jews are stingy.’
‘Shmul,’ they would say. ‘We will sort this matter out somehow. But we will not tolerate…’
We?
Janki would be proud of his son. He wouldn’t admit it, of course he wouldn’t, he would blame him and reproach him, but he wouldn’t be able to conceal his pride. ‘My son! He has my hair and my face, and he is irresistible.’
‘François,’ she would say. ‘You must promise me once and for all…’
No. Making promises was second nature to Shmul.
She would tell him what she thought, she would drown him in a mussar sermon until he couldn’t see or hear, she would…
She managed not to get round to it for the whole evening.
First of all Janki was waiting for her, in the corridor, he came rushing towards her as soon as she had opened the door to the apartment, as if the guests, who hadn’t even arrived, of course, had been sitting in the drawing room for hours, starving and shuffling their feet. He was so beside himself that for a moment Chanele thought an accident must have happened in the flat. But the faint smell of charred hair came not from a fire, but from the tongs with which Janki had been curling his hair. He came running out of the laundry room in his long shirt, legs bare, because he had retained the habit from his tailoring days of ironing his trousers himself before important occasions, because no one else could do it to his satisfaction. He still had no trousers on, but he was already wearing his tie, a black silk kerchief knotted into a flapping Lavallière.
‘It’s a disaster,’ said Janki, already quite out of breath. ‘You’re far too late, and Salomon has arrived unannounced from Endingen. Of course I’ve invited him to dinner, that is: I had no option. But it means that now we’ll have to…’
‘The table is long enough.’ Chanele looked around for Shmul, but he was nowhere to be seen. ‘One place more or less…’
‘… means we will…’ Janki continued in a whisper. ‘… that we will be thirteen at table.’
‘Does it say anywhere that that’s forbidden?’
‘Thirteen! Don’t you understand? It’s an unlucky number.’
‘Not for Jews,’ said Chanele.
‘But all the guests are goyim!’
‘Then don’t invite your treyf friends.’ Chanele had other concerns now.