When all the guests ad been helped into their coats — ‘allow me, Frau Strähle, it was an honour, Frau Schnegg’ — when the last compliments had been paid, like tokens being put back in their box after an evening of card-games, to be distributed again on the next occasion, when even the exhausted Christine had received her traditional thank-you present — a pair of fine embroidered gloves, which she had asked for but would never wear — Chanele went back to the dining room in search of Shmul. She had still not had a chance to talk to her son.
Janki was sitting all alone at the long table. No, he wasn’t sitting, he was slumped in his upholstered chair, a general after the battle has been lost. The black silk kerchief hung like a funeral crape from his shirt collar. His mouth was pursed, as if to whistle or sing, his left hand was flat on his belly, and with his right he tapped impatiently and furiously against it, as one goes on hammering at a door that should have been opened long ago. Chanele, who was all too familiar with this pantomime, filled a glass with water from a jug, took the tin of sodium bicarbonate prescribed by Dr Bolliger from the drawer in the sideboard and set them both down in front of Janki. He tipped too much of the white powder into the glass and looked at Chanele reproachfully when the mixture foamed over the brim. After he had drunk, he burped without putting his hand over his mouth. It didn’t matter any more.
‘It was a disaster,’ he said.
‘Even though we weren’t thirteen at table?’
‘A social disaster.’
‘There’s something else you should know,’ Chanele began.
But Janki wasn’t listening. ‘A disaster,’ he said over and over again. It sounded like one of the prayers with the many repetitions that one growls to oneself on certain feast days, until the last shred of meaning has been worn away. ‘A disaster that can never be rectified.’
‘Mathilde Lutz told me…’
If, after the defeat at Sedan, Napoleon III had been asked which shirt he wanted to wear the following day, he could not have looked at the questioner with greater contempt. ‘I’m not interested in that,’ said Janki, stressing each syllable individually.
‘Do you understand? I don’t want to know! Right now your little problems with the shop are as unimportant as… as… as…’ In search of a suitable comparison his eye fell on an ashtray. He tipped the mixture of grey ash and wet, chewed cigar butts onto the good damask tablecloth, where it formed a dirty little heap, of the kind that street-sweepers make in the early morning. ‘There!’ he said. ‘That’s how unimportant it is for me right now.’
‘It’s not about the shop,’ said Chanele.
‘I don’t care what it’s about.’ The dramatic gesture — or the stomach powder — seemed to have given him new strength, and the apathetic despair that he had just revealed turned to voluble fury. ‘You weren’t there! You don’t know what has happened! While you were chatting peacefully with the ladies, about sewing or recipes or who knows what all else, while you were having a lovely evening…’
‘Nebbish!’ said Chanele.
‘… while you’ve been enjoying your life, everyone’s been tearing into me. Even Ziltener! And it wasn’t a coincidence, believe me, things like that don’t just happen on their own. They must have agreed in advance! Did you see Rauhut, that toss-pot, that shassgener, whispering with Bugmann? Of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t notice anything like that. They come to my house, they eat my food, they drink my wine, and then…’
‘What’s happened?’
Janki’s fury subsided as quickly as it had flared up. ‘There’s no point,’ he said, and pressed his hand to his body as if he were suffering not from heart-burn but from a deadly wound. ‘You can do what you like, you’re never a part of it.’
‘What a ridiculous party.’ François came into the room with the ostentatiously springy elegance of a ballet dancer who goes on striking poses after the curtain has fallen.
‘Shmul, I need to talk to you straight away about…’
‘One moment,’ said François and looked searchingly around. ‘So much politeness makes you thirsty.’
‘Right now!’
‘I will be at your disposal straight away.’
And he had gone out again.
‘It’s all Salomon’s fault,’ Janki complained. ‘If he hadn’t got involved! Why, today of all days, did he have to…?’
‘Ask him!’
Salomon had come in, his new shirt unbuttoned so that the tzitzits of his arba kanfes hung over his trousers. ‘It’s a shame the word “tie” doesn’t appear in the Bible,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it would have the same numerical value as “goyim naches”.’ Goyim naches are all the things that non-Jews for some unfathomable reason find pleasurable.
‘It’s your fault,’ said Janki.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ Salomon replied, ‘but if it makes you feel better I’ll happily take the blame for it.’
‘Why did you have to attack him like that? Councillor Bugmann of all people.’
‘He asked a question, and I answered it for him. Should I have been rude?’
‘You shouldn’t have been there at all!’
‘Believe me,’ said Salomon Meijer and smiled peacefully, ‘if I’d known who you’d invited I’d have stayed in Endingen. I prefer my shnorrers.’
‘You called them hypocrites!’
Salomon spread his arms. ‘Nu,’ he said. And in this instance it meant, ‘I’ve grown as old as this and I’m not allowed to tell the truth?’
‘What did you want here anyway?’
‘To bring this letter to Chanele.’ Salomon drew a piece of paper, folded several times and no longer quite clean, out of his trouser pocket. ‘I’ll soon have been carrying it around for two months.’
‘It must be an anonymous letter,’ was Chanele’s first thought. ‘About the pregnant salesgirl.’
But it was something quite different.
‘Since Golde, may she rest in peace, is no longer with us,’ said Salomon, ‘every day I have the feeling that I have to put things in order. My life. Has it ever occurred to you that the word “viduy”, the confession of a sin, has exactly twice the numerical value of the word “love”? That is trying to tell us: only if we admit our mistakes…’
‘Leave me in peace with your gematria!’ cried Janki.
Salomon laid the letter on the table and took Chanele by both hands. ‘Throughout your life I have always been in your debt,’ he said.
‘You have always been good to me.’
‘Perhaps this will change your opinion,’ said Salomon. ‘Here…’ He held the letter out to her. The paper rustled as she unfolded it.
There was complete silence in the room.
Until Shmul came in. He had opened the outsize champagne bottle that Strähle had brought, and was drinking it from the neck. ‘I know,’ he said, no longer elegant, ‘I know this stuff’s not kosher. But I need it now.’ He planted himself, legs apart, in front of Chanele. ‘So. What did you want to say to me?’
‘Nothing,’ Chanele replied. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’
19
Mimi loved spoiling Hinda.
The girl wasn’t really her niece, admittedly, and strictly speaking she wasn’t even a relative, but who else could you call ma fillette if you didn’t have any children of your own.
Had it been meant to be, back then, it would have been a boy. ‘It was a boy,’ they told her, and with that single sentence a living future had become a dead past. Golde tried to console her by telling her of her own misfortune, but Mimi didn’t listen. During those days she hated her mother, who of all the qualities she could have left to her, had passed on precisely this one: the inability to conceive a son. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, the doctors said and nodded encouragingly. ‘Next time everything might be fine.’ Mimi didn’t believe them, They just wanted to comfort her, they wanted to prettify the gloomy picture of her life, but she wasn’t one of those weak people that you have to lie to, not her, she could look facts in the face, and if that was how it was to be, then that was how it was to be.