‘What’s it to be?’ asked Mimi, and moistened the tip of the pencil with her tongue, as she had once seen the clerk do at the post office counter. ‘Young? Pretty? Rich?’
Chanele didn’t respond to the facetious tone and answered the questions very seriously. ‘Rich will be necessary. Yes, I think so. At least well-to-do. Otherwise Janki won’t agree with me. Young? That’s not so important. As far as I’m concerned she can be older than François. He isn’t supposed to fall in love with her, he’s just supposed to marry her.’
Mimi couldn’t believe her ears. For her, having grown up with novels, Chanele had just said something monstrous. ‘Not fall in love?’
‘I don’t think François can. That’s why it wouldn’t be good if the girl was pretty.’
‘You’re joking now.’
‘I’m just trying to see things as they are.’
‘And you see your son with an ugly old bag?’
‘I see François. As he is. And I know: if he’s married, he will cheat on his wife.’
‘Chanele!’ In a play, Mimi had heard an actor say something similarly dreadful. But not in such a calm, natural voice.
‘There’s no point pretending,’ Chanele said. ‘If you don’t accept reality, eventually you go mad. Believe me, I know that. François will always want to have everything, especially the things he’s not supposed to. And he will get them. That will make him a good businessman and a bad husband.’
‘So…’
‘I’ve thought about it very hard. A pretty young woman who’s always been accustomed to compliments, whose suitors have always been queuing up outside the front door — she would be destroyed by a man like François. First she would blame him, then herself, and then she would be unhappy for the rest of her life.’
‘You’re meshuga!’
‘You think?’ Chanele took the diary out of Mimi’s hand and set it back down in its place. Only then did she go on talking, so quietly and tonelessly that Mimi had to lean forward to understand her. ‘If Janki had married you then — could you bear being treated as he treats me?’
‘Does he treat you badly?’
‘No,’ said Chanele. ‘Does one treat one’s desk badly? One’s cigarette case? He isn’t interested enough in me to treat me badly. It’s enough for him that I’m there and do the things that need to be done.’
‘I’m sure that’s partly…’ — ‘your fault,’ Mimi had wanted to say, but the Chanele who was siting opposite her was no longer the same Chanele she had known all her life. And she herself, it seemed to her in her bedroom right now, was no longer the same Mimi. ‘I’m sure it’s down to work,’ she said for that reason. ‘A man like that has a thousand things on his mind.’
‘Of course,’ said Chanele and didn’t mean it. ‘But what matters is this: I’ve never expected much from my life, so I can cope with the fact that I haven’t had much. While you…’
‘While I have no children. I’ll soon be an old woman, and I become more and more superfluous with every year.’
‘You aren’t superfluous,’ said Chanele. ‘I, for example, need you a lot.’
Mimi rubbed her temples and then her eyes as well. She still had headaches, but that had nothing to do with it.
26
Mimi was needed, so she forgot all her complaints.
Admittedly Chanele’s plan was meshuga, she thought, and if she, Mimi, had ever come up with such an idea, people would have said she was wool-gathering again, but sometimes she had the feeling that we live in a meshugena world, and being crazy was perhaps the only reasonable option. Chanele had been very right to come to her straight away with her wish, not just because they were friends — ‘That’s what we are now, aren’t we, Chanele?’ — but above all because here in Zurich she knew every Jewish family, really every single one, that was the advantage, but also the curse, if you owned the only kosher butcher’s shop in the city. She could list every marriageable girl in the community, she could write a list if necessary, right now on the spot in the diary with the red binding. And she could introduce her to the families at any time, very discreetly and as if by chance. It was only a shame that Chanele hadn’t come up with her plan a few days earlier because today, today of all days, as a day for such introductions would have been a good one, surprisingly good, in fact, she herself believed in such hints from fate, and at some point, in a quiet minute, she would have to confide something in Chanele — one couldn’t talk to Pinchas about such matters — about one Madame Rosa and certain messages that one received at her house, but now was not the moment. She sometimes got lost in her thoughts like a child in a room full of enticing toys. Chanele had to ask her twice what was so special about this day, and she didn’t immediately understand Mimi’s answer. The clothes collection of the Hachnasat Kallah Association, she explained, clinging to the bedpost so that Chanele could tighten the laces of her corset — ‘Much tighter, I can take it!’ — this clothes collection to which she, Mimi, had to go anyway, in fact she was already far too late, would have been the ideal opportunity to take an initial look, one could meet most of the women with eligible daughters, and shidduchim, whatever men thought, were always made by the mothers. When she talked about it, Mimi was entirely in her element, and the rustic red patches on her cheek became so pronounced that she had to hide them with foundation cream; one didn’t want to look like a milkmaid, after all.
She could just come along, Chanele said, but at first Mimi didn’t want to let her. Chanele was certainly not dressed for such an occasion, and when shadchening the first impression was often crucial. People in Zurich were aware of Janki’s successful business deals, but Chanele herself knew most of them only from hearsay, and if she turned up in a dress, that… She didn’t want to be mean, she understood that with three children and a shop you didn’t have time to pay proper attention to your wardrobe, although it wouldn’t have done anyone any harm to be elegant.
Chanele refused to accept these reservations, and in the end Mimi, not unwillingly, allowed herself to be persuaded. But she demanded categorically that Chanele change her clothes, there were enough dresses there and something was bound to suit her. Chanele resisted the idea of changing, after all it wasn’t Purim, and it didn’t say anywhere in the Shulchan Orech that as a future mother-in-law you had to be got up like a maypole. Then Mimi had pulled out for her a cream satin afternoon dress from the pile that still lay on the bed, and a petticoat of starched taffeta with plissée flounces, and it was only the fact that the skirt was quite plainly far too wide around the waist that made Mimi relent. As a girl Chanele had been able to wear Mimi’s cast-off clothes without altering so much as a stitch, but recently, in spite of the best corsets, Frau Pomeranz had become somewhat matronly. Still, at least she could still do this, she quickly offered Chanele the hat that she would have lent her to go with the dress, a city model that Mimi herself had never worn, with a brightly coloured ostrich feather that hung delicately over one’s shoulder.
‘But there’s one thing I must insist on,’ she said as she put the hat carefully back in its box, ‘if you really are determined to come as you are, then you should talk very little and on no account are you to be polite.’ Chanele, she explained to her startled companion, was after all a woman from a wealthy business household, and that was exactly how she would have to appear. ‘If you think you’re too refined for them, they’ll all want to be involved with you.’
For herself Mimi chose an inconspicuous pale blue dress, very slightly enhanced with a few decorative buttons of carved mother of pearl. She was only in the background today, she thought; Chanele would have to make the big impression, that was what counted in such situations. To hear her lecture like this one might have thought she had become the successor to Abraham Singer, and whole hordes of young couples owed their happiness only to her intervention.