‘What on earth are you doing?’ Mimi asked and drew her hand back.
‘I don’t know. It’s just… We aren’t sisters, you and I. We have never been friends, either. No, don’t contradict me. There was no friendship between us, not even when we were sleeping in the same bed. They stuffed us together the way I’ve just stuffed your dresses into the cupboard, velvet next to duchesse and black next to olive, as they happened to come. We didn’t choose each other. We got along, somehow, you with me and I with you. And when we laughed together — one also laughs with random acquaintances. But we told our secrets to others. You to your Anne-Kathrin and I to my pillow. It worked quite well, didn’t it, Mimi? It worked quite well.’
‘I don’t know what you want.’
Sometimes Mimi still had the same whining voice that she had had as a little girl, when she answered everything that sounded like criticism with a precautionary wail.
‘Everything was fine until Janki came. You remember? The bandage with the blood that wasn’t his? Of course you remember. We both did everything wrong, back then, me too. And so we never became friends. I regret that now. Because after all that time we belong together. Don’t you think so, Miriam?’
Mimi had never been able to hide her emotions. Even now Chanele could read everything happening in her on her face: surprise, the beginning of an argument, the beginning of a reconciliation and then a sly don’t-show-a-thing expression. As children they had often played ‘scissors, stone, paper’, and that was exactly what Mimi had looked like every time she had been determined not to be gulled. ‘Did you come to Zurich to tell me that?’ she asked.
‘No, that’s not why. And I don’t want you to give me an answer, either. That will grow eventually. I came because I need your help.’
‘What for?’
Chanele took two of the colourful bottles from the dressing table and tinkled them together like wine glasses. ‘You need to find a shidduch,’ she said.
Mimi was a bit disappointed that Chanele had anticipated her secret plan before she’d been able to put it into operation, so she argued against it. ‘Hinda has no interest whatsoever in that kind of thing.’
‘A shidduch for François.’
Mimi was so startled that her tongue hung out of her mouth.
‘Shmul?’
‘His name is François. Whether I like it or not.’
‘But he’s far too young to get married!’
‘Believe me,’ said Chanele, ‘he’s old enough.’
‘The boy is twenty-one.’
‘And he isn’t to get married straight away. But soon. As soon as possible.’
‘How could Janki come up with such a meshugena idea?’
‘Janki knows nothing about it.’
‘And you want…?’
‘If you help me.’
Mimi looked at Chanele in amazement, thought — scissors? stone? paper? — and then held her hand out. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said.
It was good to talk about it. About François’s smile, in which the eyes didn’t smile too, that fake, polite smile with which he had always frightened Chanele, even when he was still a little boy, because even then his face had been like a book in a foreign language. How he had once, at five or six, persuaded another little boy, the godson of a cook, to put his hand on the red-hot oven door and how then, when the boy wept and screamed, he had said quite unmoved, ‘I just wanted to see if I could make him do it.’ How he had always brought good reports home from school, without really doing anything for them, because he always found someone to do his homework for him or let him copy it; how on Shabbos, when he was forbidden to do any kind of work, three or four of his fellow pupils would often be waiting for him outside the front door, practically beating each other up to be allowed to carry his schoolbag. One of his teachers had once, when he went with his wife to the Emporium and Chanele introduced herself to him, actually raved about what a gifted, yes, he had no qualms about putting it like that, what a blessed son she had, and François, when she mentioned it, had smiled his smile and said, ‘He’s a pushover; he has podagra, and on the days when he limps particularly badly, you just have to ask him how he is.’ Then, when he started helping in the shop, in the Drapery Store with Janki rather than with Chanele in the Emporium, he made a game of bringing the customer unsaleable pieces, goods from last year or with small flaws, and was pleased every time he talked someone into a sale and they were grateful to him. Chanele also described François’s very idiosyncratic way of speaking, which she called ‘poisoned’, because he was apparently able to say the most challenging things very politely, with a smile and a bow from the hip, and she told of how he felt superior to other people and despised those people for it.
For once Mimi was a good listener. She nodded or tilted her head back and forth in a amazement, said, ‘Vraiment?’ or ‘Mon Dieu!’ and didn’t let go of Chanele’s hand all the while.
But then when Chanele got to the evening of the goyish dinner, when she told of how Mathilde Lutz had knocked at her office door and told her that a young salesgirl was pregnant, and by whom, in her excitement Mimi forgot to speak French, exclaimed, ‘me neshuma!’ and ‘Shema beni!’ and patted Chanele’s hand as one does on a sickbed visit, when one wants to give the patient more hope than one actually feels.
In forty years the two women had never been so close.
‘What are you going to do about the girl? Mimi asked at last. ‘Such a thing could be a scandal, particularly in a small town like your Baden.’
‘I know,’ said Chanele, and didn’t seem to be particularly worried about a scandal. ‘But I’ve already got something under way.’
‘Sometimes,’ thought Mimi, ‘sometimes Chanele has a smile not that unlike her son’s. Except that she would be horrified if she knew.’ She felt a sudden urge to take Chanele in her arms and press her very, very firmly to her. But of course she didn’t, she just asked, ‘And Shmul…?’
‘His name is François.’
‘Do you think he loves her?’
Chanele shook his head. ‘He just wanted to see if he could make her do it.’
‘And now you want to marry him soon?’
‘I think it will be the best thing. Because it will rein him in. It’s not a good solution, but it’s still the best one.’
Mimi stroked her friend’s fingers. Her friend? So be it: her friend. Those hands that had worked for so long in Golde’s kitchen had become no less rough during the years when Chanele had been Madame Meijer.
‘I’ve got a secret to tell you,’ Mimi said, and her sudden courage turned her cheeks quite red. ‘The loveliest thing for me, the loveliest thing ever, would have been to have children of my own. But if I can’t have any, if it simply isn’t to be, then the second loveliest would be to make a shidduch for others. I sometimes think: I’m God’s experiment to see if one can make a mother-in-law from scratch.’ She laughed as she said it, but she meant it in all seriousness.
On the dressing table, among all the fashionable fripperies, there was a diary. Its pages were still quite empty, even though it was for the year 1887. Mimi hadn’t bought it then because she needed it, but because it was bound in such beautiful Morocco leather, exactly the same leather as the money bag that Janki had used so many years ago to open his own shop… Anyway. It had a little silver pencil which she now picked up, flipped the diary open and said like a waiter taking an order: ‘So, Madame Meijer! I’m listening!’ She looked girlishly dainty, sitting there with her head tilted expectantly to one side, and the sight made Chanele feel slightly sad in a not disagreeable way, like entries in an old poetry album.