He said a name.
Salomon Meijer.
Chanele, who never did such a thing, dropped the plate.
Salomon leapt to his feet, ran to the front door, opened it so that two men now stood on the same little pedestal, three steps above the frost-glittering street, one in night-shirt and night-cap, a woollen blanket over his shoulders, a candle in his hand, the other, although without a frock coat, very correctly dressed. They stood almost side by side, for the two doors of the house were only an arm’s length apart. Oggenfuss made an exaggeratedly polite gesture which made the blanket slip from his shoulders, and said in a formal voice that contrasted strangely with his half-naked state: ‘It’s you the gentleman wants to see, Herr Meijer.’ Then he vanished into his half of the house and slammed the door behind him.
The man in the street began to laugh, coughed and painfully doubled up. In the faint light that came from the house he could only be seen indistinctly, a slim figure apparently wearing a white fur cap.
‘Salomon Meijer?’ asked the stranger. ‘I’m Janki.’
Only now did Salomon see that it was not a fur cap, but a bandage.
2
It was a thick, dirty white lint bandage, inexpertly wrapped around the man’s head, with a loose end that hung over the stranger’s shoulder like an oriental ribbon. Nebuchadnezzar out of the illustrated Bible stories wore a turban exactly the same shape, in the picture in which Daniel interprets his dream. Except that the Persian king’s turban was adorned with diamonds, not with blood. A couple of inches above his right eye a bright red spot had spread on the bandage, but if there was a fresh wound underneath it seemed to have stopped hurting. A few black curls peeped from under the edge of the white fabric. ‘A pirate,’ thought Mimi, because there had also been sea-robbers in the books that she secretly borrowed.
The stranger’s face was narrow, his eyes big and his lashes noticeably long. His skin was tanned, like that of someone who works outside a great deal, which irritated Salomon; the winter had been so long, that now, with spring apparently so reluctant to come, even the peasants were pale. In his dark face, his teeth looked remarkably white.
They had lots of time to look at him, they could study at their leisure his red and black uniform jacket, whose insignias did not match those of any troop known hereabouts, they were able to marvel at the Bohemian-looking double-knotted yellow silk kerchief that contrasted so defiantly with the rough material of the jacket; they were able to look at his narrow hands, the deft, mobile fingers, the nails, clean and neat in an unsoldierly fashion, and try to interpret what they saw as they might have interpreted an obscure verse of the Bible. Everyone seemed to be using a different commentary: Salomon saw the stranger as a scrounger, to be kept at arm’s length because he wanted something from you; Golde was reminded of the son who, had God so willed it, would have been the same age right now as this unexpected young guest; Mimi had moved on from pirates and decided he was an explorer, a global traveller who had seen everything and had much more still to see. Chanele was busy at the stove, and didn’t seem interested in the solution of this mystery that had dropped in out of nowhere; except the line of her eyebrows was higher on her face than usual.
The visitor didn’t wait to be offered a chair, he chose a seat at the table, his back so close to the stove that Golde was worried he would burn himself. But no, he replied, if someone had been as cold as him, nothing could ever be too hot again.
And then he ate. And how he ate!
Even before the water was put on for his tea, he grabbed, without bothering to ask, the goyish berches, he tore fist-sized pieces from it with his unwashed hands, and without a word of blessing, and stuffed it into his mouth. He went on bolting it down even when Salomon told to him why the bread wasn’t kosher, he choked in his greed, he coughed and spat half-chewed chunks on the table. Even Mimi’s dove-grey housecoat got a spatter, which she rubbed away with her finger before, when everyone else was looking at the strange guest, sticking it quickly in her mouth.
Nothing was left of the chopped eggs, the carp had disappeared, so had the herrings, and even the pot of Mother Feigele’s sauerkraut, which could have satisfied a big family for a week, was more than half empty. Eventually Golde looked questioningly at her husband, and he nodded resignedly and said, ‘Very well, then.’ Golde went into the little room in which the window behind the bars was always slightly open, brought in the package that she’d been keeping cool, then set it down on the table in front of the stranger and pulled open the cloth. And he, even though he had already eaten more than a whole minyan of pious men after a feast day, stared as ecstatically at Sarah’s cheesecake as the children of Israel once gazed upon the first manna in the desert.
Then the cake too was devoured to the very last crumb. The man had set aside his cutlery, and instead clutched a steaming glass so firmly that it was easy to telclass="underline" he hadn’t yet warmed up. Chanele had prepared the special mixture that was known in this family as Techías Hameisim tea, because it was said to be able to raise the dead; candy sugar dissolved in a camomile brew with honey and cloves and a big shot of schnapps from Salomon’s private bottle. The stranger drank in great slugs. It was only when he had emptied a second glass that he began to tell his story.
He spoke Yiddish, just as they all spoke Yiddish, not the supple, musical language of the East, but the ponderous, peasant form common in Alsace, the Great Duchy of Baden and of course here in Switzerland, too. The melody was slightly different — more elegant, Mimi thought — but they had no trouble understanding each other.
‘So I’m Janki,’ said the man, whose coughing seemed to have calmed down. ‘You will have heard of me.’
‘Perhaps.’ A cattle dealer never says ‘yes’ too quickly, and never too quickly ‘no’. Salomon knew lots of Jankis, but not one in particular.
‘I come from Paris. That is to say: I actually come from Guebwiller.’
Salomon pushed back his chair, as he always did, without noticing it himself, when he started to become interested in a business deal. Paris was far away, but Guebwiller was a known quantity.
‘Did the son of your uncle Jossel marry into Guebwiller?’ Golde asked Salomon. ‘What was his name again?’
To her surprise it was the strange man who answered her question. ‘Schmul,’ he said. ‘My father’s name was Schmul.’
‘Was,’ he had said, not ‘is’, so they all murmured their blessing for the Judge of Truth before they all started talking at once.
‘You are…?’
‘He is…?’
‘What uncle Jossel would that be?’
An uncle, according to traditional Jewish practice, is not just the brother of the father or the mother. Even a much more distant relation can be an uncle; the tree is important, not the individual branch. Salomon hadn’t really known this uncle Jossel, he just thought he remembered a small, nimble man who had danced for so long at a chassene that the trumpeter’s lips had hurt. But at the time Salomon had been fifteen or sixteen, an age when one is interested in all kinds of things, just not strange relatives who come all the way to a wedding and then disappear again.
‘What uncle Jossel?’ Mimi asked again.
‘He was a son of Uncle Chaim, who you don’t know either,’ Salomon tried to explain, ‘and his father and my great-great grandfather were brothers.’ And he added after a pause, ‘I think. But am I Mother Feigele?’ Which was supposed to mean: if you want to know more, ask someone who has nothing more sensible to do than deal with family trees all day.