She found Regula, Frau Küttel, the cleaner, and last of all Hinda in the kitchen where they all, at a time when the preparations for lunch should really have been far advanced, were drinking coffee with lumps of bread and, as far as Mimi could tell from the sentence that broke off mid-word as she appeared, discussing Regula’s favourite topic, the question of whether the tram driver at whom she had been making eyes for weeks now, might have more serious intentions. Mimi had to become quite fierce, although that was far from easy in her condition, and she also had to tell Hinda, who often had quite déclassé tendencies, off for socialising with the staff. Hinda merely laughed and said that in all honesty she found Regula’s love story more interesting than any novel, at least she had never yet come across a novel in which a gallant had slapped his sweetheart on the backside and said appreciatively, ‘You’re better padded than my horses.’
Later — she still lacked the strength to get dressed — Mimi went through the contents of her clothes cupboard with Hinda. The Hachnasat Kallah Association, which supplied dresses for impoverished brides, had organised a collection of cast-off clothes, and as wife of the community shochet — ‘You can’t imagine how people watch you!’ — Mimi felt obliged to contribute something. But it was actually only a pretext to spread out the treasures of her wardrobe once again.
She had just taken out a day dress of greyish brown silk twill with a maroon rose pattern, a dress that had always suited her very well, but the skirt of which she really couldn’t wear any more, because it still had a cul de Paris cut, and that was truly out of fashion once and for all, and she was busy persuading Hinda that the tight-fitting jacket with the little collar and the jacquard trimming on the cuffs would actually suit her youthful figure very well, although obviously with a different skirt, they would donate the old one to the impoverished brides, and in all that activity she had begun to forget how poorly she was actually feeling, when there was a ring at the flat door. ‘I’m not at home to anyone!’ Mimi called and, pained by the wound of her own voice, had to draw little circles on her temples with her fingertips.
‘Frau Pomeranz isn’t at home,’ they heard Regula explaining a little later. And then, in response to an inaudible objection from the visitor, the maid added. ‘She definitely isn’t! She just told me herself.’
Hinda bit her hand so as not to burst out laughing. Mimi rolled her eyes with a long-suffering expression.
Regula’s protest, increasingly uncertain and hence increasingly shrill, made it clear that the uninvited guest would not be fobbed off as easily as that, and at last the maid knocked at the room of the door and said, ‘I’m sorry, Frau Pomeranz, but there’s a lady here who absolutely…’
‘It’s me!’ a voice rang out from the corridor.
‘Mama!’ Hinda exclaimed and pulled the door open.
Regula watched the embrace between mother and daughter with disapproval. ‘I told her you weren’t here,’ she explained reproachfully to Mimi. ‘But she came in anyway.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about it,’ Regula grumbled, as insulted as someone whose cake has been a failure because of a deliberately incorrect recipe, and withdrew to the kitchen again, to continue analysing the presumed intentions of the tram driver.
Chanele must have come straight from the station; the smell of the locomotives still clung to her. She was not, however, as the rules of etiquette would have dictated, wearing a travelling suit, but her ‘uniform’ that she usually wore in the shop, and a hat that had not been en vogue at least since last season.
‘You haven’t even put on gloves!’ Mimi said reproachfully.
‘Nor you a dress.’
‘You have no idea how dreadful I feel.’
‘Have you come to pick me up?’ Hinda asked, and didn’t seem at all keen on the idea.
‘Let’s talk about that later. Now I have something to discuss with Mimi. Alone.’ Chanele said it in a tone that her daughter had never heard before: not actually severe, that would have been the wrong word, but such that it wouldn’t have occurred to one to contradict her.
Hinda curtsied obediently. ‘Then I’ll be in the kitchen.’
‘Tell Regula to clear away the breakfast things,’ Mimi called after her. ‘And that lunch…’ She put her hand to her brow and sighed. ‘Although I myself couldn’t eat a single… I can’t even think about it.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘Ach!’ said Mimi, and the dame de salon at the municipal theatre could not have outdone her bravely dismissive gesture. She was about to lead her guest into the dining-room — ‘Although everything is still standing around in there; I don’t know how I end up with such terrible staff!’ — but Chanele shook her head.
‘Let’s go into your room. It seems… how shall I put it? It seems more appropriate to me.’
There wasn’t even room for the two of them to sit down; the bed and both chairs were covered with clothes. Automatically, as she would have done in the shop, Chanele started clearing things away, while Mimi squatted on the Turkish pouffe by her dressing table and dabbed her temples with eau de cologne. For a while the only sound was the rustle of fabric and the click of hangers.
‘Mimi,’ Chanele said at last and studied the moiré effect on a yontev dress as intently as if she had never seen anything similar in all her time in the trade. ‘Mimi… Did it bother you very much that we never wanted to call you Miriam?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘There was a time when that was very important to you. Back then I never understood, but today… It would have been your real name, you had a right to it, and all of us — whether out of habit or cosiness — only ever called you Mimi.’
‘But I’m called Mimi.’
‘Of course, today.’ Chanele held the dress high to shake it out. It looked as if she were dancing with a life-sized doll, the gently rustling material a curtain between the two women. ‘But you never wondered whether you might have turned into a completely different person if you had had your own name?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’ Mimi said it in the pitiful voice of a child that doesn’t want to go to school. ‘I have a headache.’
Chanele hung the dress in the cupboard and said, more into the black opening that smelled of old experiences than to Mimi: ‘I don’t understand it myself.’
She had already cleared a chair, and now she carried it over to the dressing table and sat down opposite Mimi, so close that their knees almost touched. Janki, long ago now, had once sat opposite Chanele like that. She had been afraid to look at him, but she had felt his breath. She had been almost naked at the time, so wonderfully naked. And then he had asked her…
What had she expected? If you have notions, it’s your own fault.
She took Mimi’s right hand, leaned over, breathed in the smell of bedroom and eau de cologne and suddenly kissed those strange fingertips.