‘For ever?’ Salomon thought.
‘For ever,’ thought Mimi.
3
Next morning Janki had a high fever.
His cold, only temporarily concealed by the excitements of the previous evening, had returned invigorated, if it was indeed only a cold and not, heaven forfend, bronchitis or worse. Salomon had set off for Degermoos early in the morning, without seeing his guest again, and so it was left to the three women to tend to the patient.
They had set up a bed for him in the attic room, and there he lay now, his whole body boiling hot and still shivering with cold. His vacant eyes were open wide, but if you moved your hand in front of them, the pupils didn’t follow the movement. Every now and again a dry cough shook Janki’s body, as if an unknown person were hammering his chest from within. His lips trembled, like a premature baby that wanted to cry but didn’t yet have the strength, or an old man who had already used up all the tears that life had assigned him.
The room was dark and sticky. Up here, where only a shnorrer would ever have spent the night, there was no real window, just a hatch that could be opened a crack to let in a little light and air. But outside it was icy cold and frozen, one of those jangling late winter days when every breath cuts your throat, and Golde said Janki had — me neshuma! — had enough. So the hatch remained closed, and lest the patient be left entirely in the dark, they had had to light some flickering candles that almost went out every time someone’s skirt stirred in the cramped room. Practical Chanele suggested putting the candles in jars, but Mimi emphatically resisted the idea, and when Chanele asked for a sensible reason, Mimi wiped tears from her eyes and refused to answer. The inexpressible reason, and Golde felt this exactly as her daughter did, was of course that such candles would have looked like the commemorative ones set up on the day of a relative’s death.
Among the candles on the old bedside table — one leg was missing, and they had had to put a plank of wood underneath it — framed by the flickering wicks, lay Janki’s yellow neckerchief, in which Golde had tied his coins, all the kings, emperors and revolutionary spirits. She avoided looking there, because when she held the heavy lump in her hand, a thought of which she was still ashamed had passed through her mind. ‘Enough for a levaya,’ she had thought, ‘enough money for a funeral.’
Trying to do something good for Janki, the three women jostled one another by his bed, elbow to elbow. With a damp cloth Chanele dabbed away the white crust that kept forming on his lips, like a baby bringing up sour milk. Golde tried to pour a slip of lukewarm tea between his lips, but it just ran down his chin to the collar of his shirt. The trail of fluid shimmered for a moment on his hot skin, and had then vanished again. Mimi had fetched a comb, her own comb, and cleared the hair from his damp forehead for the third time.
Then Janki suddenly began to speak.
It was more of a murmur, turned inwards, not outwards, he was saying something to himself to remind himself or to forget. They couldn’t make out the words, even though they were always the same few syllables, over and over and over.
‘He’s praying,’ said Golde, and forbade herself from thinking what prayer a man who was seriously ill might utter.
‘Perhaps he’s hungry,’ said Chanele.
‘Sha!’ said Mimi, and bent so low over the sick man that his smell, unsettlingly clean and slightly sour like bread dough, enveloped her as if she were caught in its embrace. Her ear was close to his mouth, but she didn’t feel his breath, just sensed the words, which were French but incomprehensible, and which made her pointlessly jealous, an alien conversation in which she was not involved. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said more loudly than necessary. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. He is ill, and he needs peace and quiet, and, generally speaking, us treading on each other’s feet here won’t help him.’ And with those words she ran from the room, they heard her footsteps on the stairs, and the other two women, who had known Mimi for a lifetime, took a look to agree that she would now shut herself away in her room and there would be no sign of her for the next few hours.
‘Then I’ll go to Pomeranz,’ said Golde after a brief silence. Where Techías Hameisim tea did not help, she liked to deploy her most powerful weapon in the battle against illnesses of all kinds: a beef broth cooked so fiercely that a whole pound of meat produced only a single cup. Usually she would have sent Chanele to shochet Pomeranz to fetch the piece of stripped flank, but the short walk through the cold air would do her good, she thought, it would clear her head, foggy from the stuffy air. ‘You take care of things in the meantime,’ she said to Chanele, and was already outside the door.