And she had been right.
Pinchas, who was a dreamer, a hardworking shochet, but a dreamer, told her stories about women who had become mothers only after ten or twenty years, and she let him slog away at the topic and thought, ‘Just go on talking!’ She didn’t even wonder whether he got his chochmes out of the Talmud or from one of the many newspapers that he read every day. He loved arguing, except it didn’t change the facts. It was the way it was.
She had adjusted her life according to it. Childlessness filled her days as completely as motherhood would have done. She brought up her sorrow, let it grow and develop, became ever more familiar with its demands, sometimes struggled with it, as with a child that threatens to suffocate you with its constant demands for attention, then pressed it to her again and couldn’t have lived without it, not for so much as a minute. When other women talked about their children or even brought them on visits — often they didn’t — then Mimi’s fingertips drew circles on her temples and she talked about her migraine.
Childlessness gave her life content, and herself a role. She wasn’t like all the others, she had something to endure and did it bravely, and her misfortune, although she would have contradicted anyone who had dared to say as much, made her happy. She had — one went to the new municipal theatre and knew the specialist terminology — become a character actress, no longer the naïve young girl no one remembers once the performance is over. She had found her theme, and now lived it out in ever new variations.
When Hinda came to visit — and it was only right that she came often, her aunt was a lonely woman with a sorrow, and needed company and distraction — then Mimi experienced all the motherliness she assumed lay within her, she was a best friend and a discreet confidante. She would have liked to give Hinda advice in matters of love, and was repeatedly disappointed that her niece still seemed to show no interest in the matter. ‘That will be down to Chanele,’ Mimi thought often. ‘Such a dry old stick — where would the daughter get it from?’
It was Mimi’s greatest dream to find Hinda a shidduch, not just anyone, but the perfect shidduch, an affluent, educated, very special husband. Chanele would have to thank her, and she would say, ‘Mais de rien, ma chère. You live away off in Baden, so remote from polite society — someone had to take care of things.’ Janki would see them standing side by side, his Chanele, as colourless as the headmistress as a girls’ boarding school, and Mimi, a lady of the world who knew how to behave and dress herself. She would smile at him, smile at him as a sister might, and say, ‘I hope you’ve found happiness.’ She also knew exactly which hat she would wear to that chassene, nothing conspicuous, certainly not, a childless woman whose life is filled with sorrow doesn’t doll herself up, but she had seen black swan feathers at her milliner’s, soft, sad feathers.
‘I am a black swan,’ thought Mimi.
At a tea party she had sat Hinda next to Siegfried Kahn, who studied law and who, given the importance of his family in the silk importing trade, would soon be a successful lawyer. Furthermore, apart from his sickly sister, he was an only child and would eventually inherit the lot. But after their meeting Hinda had only laughed, and imitated the way the student twisted his head, in its high starched collar, back and forth like an owl, ‘as if he had no neck’. Mimi had had no more success with Mendel Weisz from the matzo baking dynasty; Hinda had submitted to his awkward compliments and then said, ‘A matzo factory might be very useful at Pesach, but what would I do with him for the rest of the year?’
Chanele really hadn’t prepared her daughter very well for life.
Today there were no young men on the agenda, but who knew whom one would meet in town? Hinda’s clothes were all of good quality, after all she was the daughter of the biggest drapery in Baden, but all très simple, more suited to a provincial backwater than for a proper city. Luckily Mimi had taste, and you can do lots with a nice cape and a parasol.
She herself wore a very plain twin piece in dark blue silk satin, the jupon cut straight, with a wide pleated flounce and a sewn-on twill ribbon, and the long jacket was very simple too, with a little plissé ruching and with a barely noticeable inset of silk twill. Hair was worn very severely that year anyway, with the tiniest of hats. Her umbrella alone was slightly extravagant.
‘Where are we going?’ Hinda asked.
‘We’ll have a cup of hot chocolate later in the Palm Garden. But first… You’ll see.’
The flat was in Sankt Anne Gasse, directly above the butcher’s shop. Mimi didn’t really like living there. Having a shop in one’s house was, in her opinion, très ordinaire, but of course it was practical too. Since Pinchas had taken on an assistant, young Elias Gutterman, a very efficient shochet, and luckily one who could stand on his own two feet, he was often able to absent himself from the shop for an hour or two, and then only had to climb a flight of stairs and he was sitting at his desk. Over the last few years he had been writing more and more little articles, which had appeared under the abbreviation — pp — in a few German newspapers and now even in the newly founded Zurich Tages-Anzeiger. A financially unrewarding art, of course, but the butcher’s shop was going well, and Mimi, as she often stressed, didn’t get involved in it.
They didn’t head towards Löwenstrasse where, only a few yards from the butcher’s shop, the synagogue was, but went first to Bahnhofstrasse and then along one of the little alleys up into the Old Town. Mimi still wouldn’t say what she had planned, but for some reason she was very excited. ‘You don’t need to be afraid, Hinda,’ she said impetuously, ‘nothing at all can happen.’
Hinda laughed. It was hard to imagine that anyone in Aunt Mimi’s milieu might do anything serious, let alone anything frightening.
They came to a house in Wohllebgasse, a building so narrow it looked as if the neighbours had reluctantly shifted sideways a little to make room for it. On the ground floor was an upholsterer’s workshop. A group of tatty chairs with their innards spilling out stood in the street in a semicircle, as if awaiting unloved guests.
To get into the house, you first had to enter the workshop and then leave it again immediately through a rough wooden side door. The pungent smell of boiling glue made way in the narrow, dark stairway for the intense smell of cabbage soup, a poor-people smell that Mimi would have on any other occasion described as dégoûtant or affreux. Now she just pulled up her skirt and climbed the creaking stairs ahead of Hinda, past a door behind which the cries of a baby and a cross woman’s voice could be heard, and a second, behind which a dog was furiously barking and repeatedly hurling itself against the wood with a dull thud.
On the top floor, where the walls were already beginning to slope, Mimi stopped by a door to which a brass lion’s head was fixed. It was probably intended as a doorknocker, but its mouth lacked the appurtenant ring.
‘What…?’ Hinda began to ask.
Mimi put a finger to her lips. ‘Take your gloves off,’ she whispered.
Even without a knock on the door, their arrival was noted. A gaunt woman of perhaps fifty, but perhaps much older, opened the door a crack. She wore a light grey skirt and a high buttoned blouse in the same colour, fastened at the neck by a silver brooch. Her hair was covered with a scarf of starched material, also grey. Her eyes were narrowed, as though even the gloomy light of the stairwell was too bright for her. Without a word of greeting she nodded to Mimi, as matter-of-factly as if she were ticking off a sheet on a laundry list, and then turned her suspicious gaze on Hinda.