Freed equally from Golde’s clucky concern and from Mimi’s impractical over-eagerness, Chanele first of all opened the hatch in the roof — even with a fever, she said to herself, you can’t freeze under a thick eiderdown — blew the candles out, then sat down by the bed with a bowl of vinegar water and methodically changed the cold compresses that were supposed to draw the fever to the feet and from there out of the body. Once, struggling with the stranger in his chest, Janki rolled over so violently that he threw the eiderdown to the floor. The skin on his legs was paler than that of his face, and his penis was long and thin.
The French words that he repeated so often, without being able to remember them later, were two lines from a song: about a drummer drumming the march and the ravens sitting in the trees and waiting.
In a village the night has many eyes and even more ears. Their night-time visit was already bound to have travelled around the community, and Golde knew that everyone she met would ask questions, some of them spoken out loud, but most, even more pressing, silent. So she didn’t go straight to the Marktgasse, but took a detour via the Mühleweg, along the Surb and past the mikvah, the bathing house, where she was unlikely to meet an acquaintance at this time of day. The little meadow where the river gently bends and where you can rub your washing clean so well would be deserted in the icy cold.
She walked quickly, on her short, always slightly waddling steps, a duck that’s being driven on with sticks but still can’t quite bring itself to fly. The wind swept particles of ice from the trees; they struck Golde’s face like fine needles, and she enjoyed the stinging pain because it ennobled the purchase of a pound of meat for soup into a mission full of self-sacrifice. Where the alleyways narrowed again and the houses with their curious windows waited for her, she pulled the black headscarf tighter around her head, and actually managed to reach Naftali Pomeranz’s shop without a single person talking to her.
Naftali wasn’t there. Only Pinchas, his son, of whom Pomeranz was so proud, looked after the shop, a lanky lad, as long and thin as his father, with a thin growth of beard and a big gap in his teeth in which, when he was embarrassed, his tongue played. He was standing at the window with a rag in one hand and a book in the other, had probably started cleaning it and then immersed himself once more in his reading. When Golde addressed him, he started wildly, dropped his book, just managed to catch it, had to bend down for the rag and said at last that his father had gone to shul, to the synagogue, to prepare the Torah scrolls for the Pesach service, and could she come back later, he wouldn’t be long.
‘No wonder he’s still single at twenty-five,’ thought Golde. No, she said severely, she couldn’t come back later, she had a sick guest at home who needed his strengthening soup, and as quickly as possible.
‘I’d like to fetch my father, I’d love to,’ said Pinchas and almost started stammering, ‘but he expressly ordered me to stay in the—’
‘Run!’
Sarah Pomeranz had come in, the woman whose cheesecake put Rothschild’s cook to shame. Even though she spent her life in the kitchen, she was just as gaunt as her husband and her son. It was almost part of her everyday outfit that her hands were covered with flour to the wrists, and she had to wipe them off on her apron before she was able to greet Golde properly. She closed the shop door behind Pinchas — ‘Who buys meat in the middle of the week?’ — and said in that way so characteristic of her: ‘You’ll have a coffee with me, no formalities, you give what you have.’ Golde, feeling slightly sick after all the excitement, was happy to accept the invitation, even though she knew that there was as much curiosity as hospitality involved. He who keeps secrets makes no friends.
While Sarah ran a handful of beans into the coffee mill and, to show how much she valued this visit, added another half-handful, Golde began to deliver her report. ‘He’s the same age as my son,’ she said, because sometimes, above all in events that violently stirred her emotions, she saw the child that hadn’t been allowed to live now standing before her as a grown-up man.
‘They say he’s a foreigner.’
‘A Frenchman, yes.’
‘And how did he come to you?’
‘He’s mishpocha of my husband.’
‘Ah, mishpocha,’ repeated Sarah, as if that explained everything, and explain everything it did. ‘And his name is?’
‘Janki. Janki Meijer.’
Sarah put the big dough bowl on the floor to make room on the table and straightened a table for Golde. ‘He wears a uniform, they say.’
‘He was a soldier.’
‘Wounded?’
‘No, nothing — Baruch Hashem! — happened to him.’
‘But he has a bandage. They say.’
‘He only has it… for security.’ There’s nothing, Golde noticed, that connects someone more closely with a person than a shared secret.
While her hostess turned the handle of the coffee mill, only with her fingertips as if that would make it quieter, Golde told her what she knew of Janki. As she did so she must have exaggerated slightly — when does one ever have the chance to tell such an adventurous tale? — because when the coffee was poured, a lot of coffee, not much water, as one does with honoured guests, Sarah sat down at her cup saying, ‘Just imagine… No older than my Pinchas, and already he’s survived Sedan!’ She made the sound of Jewish astonishment, a drawn-out hiss, the head moving back and forth so that the sound seems to ebb and flow.
‘He didn’t hear a single shot fired,’ Golde tried to correct her.
‘Not one? In such a big battle? Yes, God can protect a person wonderfully well.’ And because she always saw her husband’s shammes duties as her own, Sarah added, ‘He will be summoned to the Torah and bentch gomel.’
Golde didn’t contradict her any further. There are stories that are stronger than reality. And besides, she liked the idea that Janki, whom she already called her Janki in her mind, should be a hero and in the end: marching his feet bloody and sharing a kennel with a farm dog — is that any less heroic than fighting in a battle? She was already looking forward to the moment when he, healed once more, might stand on the almemor in the synagogue and bentch gomel. Who had more reason than he to speak as a thanksgiver for dangers survived? They would look down at him from the women’s shul, and the other women would say, ‘Without Golde’s beef broth, heaven forfend, he wouldn’t have survived.’
They drank their coffee, black and with lots of sugar, and Sarah flushed with pride when Golde told her how much the God-protected Janki had liked her cheesecake, how not a single piece of it had been left, indeed, he had pushed the crumbs together and licked them from the palm of his hand. ‘He’ll fit in well with us here in the village,’ Sarah said out of deep conviction, and Golde heard herself expressing, to her own surprise, something that she had not yet even really thought: ‘Yes, he will stay here. We will take him in. He has no one else, after all.’
Then Naftali Pomeranz came in and would have loved to hear all the news, but was sent to the shop to cut the meat. Sarah insisted — ‘That’s the least we can do!’ — that Golde didn’t take the little parcel home herself, but that Pinchas went with her. After all, doing something for a sick person was a God-pleasing deed, a mitzvah, and it would be a pleasure for her son, ‘isn’t that right, Pinchasle?’
Pinchas took such long strides that Golde almost had to scuttle her short legs to keep up with him. Out of pure politeness she tried to talk to the young man once or twice, and praised him for promising to be, as one heard, a worthy successor to his father, but couldn’t entice a sensible word from him. It was only when they were standing at the door of the double-fronted house and he handed her the parcel that he suddenly blurted, ‘Abraham Singer comes to see you often, doesn’t he?’ then turned and ran away without waiting for an answer.