‘Strange,’ thought Golde. ‘Why would he care whether the marriage broker had called on Mimi?’
While the beef broth was still cooking — perhaps the smell alone, drifting through the house, would have an effect — Janki fell asleep. His breath, although it still had a quiet, papery rustle, was so calm, and his forehead was so much cooler, that Chanele dried his feet, covered them up and crept from the room on tiptoe.
Janki was quite alone now. Uncle Melnitz sat on the empty chair by his bed and talked to him.
‘You’re asleep,’ said Melnitz. ‘You think nothing can happen to you when you’re here. But that’s not true. Here is no different from anywhere else. Nowhere is different.
‘Ten years ago was the last time it happened. Here in Endingen, yes. We were to get a few more rights. Not rights like the Christians, but almost like human beings. And they smashed in our windows. Not only the windows. Sometimes one of those stones lands on your head. Little Pnina had only herself to blame. She should have run away faster. Or made herself invisible. They would like us much better if we were invisible, yes.
‘There are no guilty parties, because no one was there. No one anyone knew. They’d discussed that. They’d also agreed that everything would happen unprepared. From the people. From the moment.’
Uncle Melnitz had closed his eyes like someone only repeating a lesson learned long ago to be sure that he hasn’t forgotten it.
‘And at the start of the century we had the plum war here in Endingen, that’s right. A little war. We live in a small country. The French had occupied Switzerland at the time. Napoleon. But they didn’t wage war against him. He wouldn’t have been afraid of their sticks. They fought against us. That’s simpler. They had taught us not to defend ourselves long ago.
‘They called it the plum war because the ripe plums were hanging from the trees. They like to wait until the harvest is over. Before, you have so much else to do. Afterwards you need something to do with your strength.
‘There was another name for it. The ribbon war. Because they stole the bright ribbons from the dealers they beat up. They took other things too, but you saw the ribbons afterwards. Fastened to jackets. To sleeves. To hats. As medals, that’s right. To show that they’d been there. Pride. Afterwards they always had only two possibilities. To be proud or be ashamed. They preferred to be proud.
‘Someone from the village, a head of the community — his name was Guggenheim, like the inn — tried to talk to them. That was a mistake. If you talk, you’re a human being, and they didn’t want us to be human beings. Because you don’t stick your pitchfork in a human being’s face, so that a prong goes in one cheek and out the other. Because you don’t laugh at a human being when he tries to talk and can’t because his tongue is torn. Because you don’t hit a human being on the back of the head with a threshing flail just to make them stop screaming.
‘Plum war, that’s right. They called it war because the word made heroes of them. They’re always heroes, every time they lay into us.’
Janki had closed his eyes. The blanket over his chest rose and sank only slightly, a ship that had reached the harbour and still remembered the waves from a distance. One hand lay beside his head, palm upwards, as if he were waiting for a present.
‘You think you’re safe now,’ said Melnitz. ‘But there is no safety. When he was lying on the floor and had stopped moving, one of them put his boot on his head. One that the girls liked because even after a bottle of wine he didn’t touch them against their will. One who liked to play tunes on a comb with a sheet of paper folded over it. One who quickly picked dandelions for the rabbit whose neck he was going to break. A nice person.
‘He put his boot on his head and pressed his face in the dirt because he wouldn’t have been able to pull out the pitchfork otherwise. Tools are expensive, and the fork didn’t belong to him. If he had been alone, he would have apologised as he did it. He was a decent person, yes. But he wasn’t alone. They are never alone.
‘There is no safety,’ said Melnitz and told another story and another. He spoke without haste, someone who has a lot of time to fill. The way one speaks the Shemoneh Esrei at solemn festivals, one interpolation and then another. ‘Sometimes they shout,’ he said, ‘and sometimes they whisper. Sometimes they are silent for a long time, and you think they’ve forgotten us. But they don’t forget us. Believe me, Janki. They don’t forget us.’
The smell of beef broth now filled the whole house the way incense, they say, fills a church.
4
‘Horses?’
Salomon had been reluctant to take Janki along with him. First of all, people who have just been sick belong at home, and second… He hadn’t been able to say the second to Golde. His wife had taken this relative, this unexpected visitor, as unreservedly to her heart as, many years ago, Mimi had the kitten that a farm hand had wanted to drown and which, facing perils that grew with every repetition of the story, she had rescued from the Surb River. Then as now, arguments would have served no useful purpose, and Golde would certainly not have accepted the actual reason for his rejection: Salomon didn’t trust Janki. It was only a feeling, a grumbling in his belly, but Salomon had avoided many a bad deal because he had believed his belly more than his head.
So in the end he had given in, not because of Janki’s pleading eyes, even though they had seemed as big in that sunken face as the eyes of a pregnant cow, but just to have some peace. He had even lent him a coat, his own old coat, which he always wore when he knew he would be spending the whole day in byres, and had been annoyed — ‘Nu, it’s going to smell of violet water!’ — over the fact that Janki screwed up his nose and tested the heavy fabric as contemptuously between his fingers as a grain-dealer pulverising a dead ear of corn. He had lent him, no, given him, boots as well; why put off acts of generosity that you can’t avoid anyway? ‘It’s nice’, Golde had said, ‘that he’s so interested in your business. Who knows, perhaps it’s something for him later on?’ And Salomon, true to the principle that it’s usually a good idea to hold your tongue, hadn’t replied, ‘A tailor as a beheimes dealer? Is he going to measure up riding trousers for the cows?’
So now they walked along side by side. Salomon’s umbrella left its trail of holes, and Janki’s boots, always a few steps behind, tramped them closed again. It was the first warm day this year; the spring dripped freshly thawed from the trees, on which the birds practised twittering as eagerly as if their beaks had been frozen shut throughout all those months. There was not a trace of romanticism in Salomon Meijer, he didn’t even know the word, and yet today he would have preferred them to have walked in silence through the splashy morning.
But Janki talked. Still weakened by fever, he struggled to keep up, and talked. He stopped to catch his breath, ran a few steps behind, which left him even more short of breath, and talked. Salomon wasn’t walking any faster than usual, but he wasn’t walking more slowly either. He was on his way to meet master butcher Gubser in the byre that he had rented from the lea-farmer, and he would arrive on time for his appointment as he always did. Did Janki absolutely insist on coming? Nu, let him. If he wanted to waste his meagre strength chatting, instead of saving it for walking, then let him.
On the evening of his arrival, Janki had talked like a little boy coming home after his first day in cheder, and who has to get off his chest all the fears he endured from his strange new teacher. Now his breathless flow of chat had something of a quack doctor praising his home-made medicine in the marketplace, good against headaches, toothache and women’s complaints, promising guaranteed healing as long as the patient was willing to swallow the brew for three weeks, every day at the same time — probably aware that he himself would be standing far away in a different market in three weeks, and that all promises are forgotten in a year or even in only six months.