Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  The treasures of the Panopticon were even more exciting than they had been in his dreams. There was the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ (a half-naked man being stretched on the rack by a hunchbacked torturer), the ‘Medieval Scold’s Bridle’ (two old women fastened to a kind of yoke by the neck and wrists), ‘Witch Torture in the Middle Ages’, the ‘Indian Widow-Burning’, ‘Mary Stuart’s Final Walk’ and the ‘Oriental Harem’. Each exhibit was accompanied by an explanatory panel, and Arthur studied these as carefully as if he had had to sit an exam about them at school.

  He also visited the medical cabinet, at whose entrance there hung a panel which could be turned to face one way or the other, ‘Now only for Gentlemen’, or ‘Now only for Ladies’. This cabinet, he had no doubt, had been the reason for the headmaster’s ban. Filled with guilt and curiosity he contemplated the ‘Siamese Twins’, the ‘Osman Eunuchs’, and did not fail to linger over the pedagogical displays warning about ‘The Damaging Effects of Self-Abuse’ (a man with tumours all over his body, his hands thrown to his face in despair), and the ‘Consequences of Corset Wearing’ (a woman with a naked torso, whose waist was no wider than a napkin ring).

  Only then came the modern section, with ‘Gorilla Abducting Farmer’s Daughter’, ‘Moltke and MacMahon in the Battle of Sedan’, the ‘African Explorer Casati Imprisoned by the Bantu Negroes’, the ‘Chicago Triple Murder’ and . . .

  So filled was Arthur with images and impressions that at first he didn’t understand what he was looking at.

  A man dressed in black, with a big hat and long locks on his temples, had grabbed a little girl by the back of the neck, as one holds a cat before drowning it, and cutting open her throat with a long knife. A second man, identical in appearance, was catching the blood in a silver bowl.

  On the cardboard sign under the pane of glass it said: ‘The Ritual Murder of Tisza-Eszlar.’

  Lightning flashed outside. In the sudden change of light the man with the knife seemed to be winking at Arthur.

  It had grown so dark, in the middle of the afternoon, that the explanatory panel wasn’t easy to decipher.

  ‘On Easter Sunday 1882,’ it said, ‘in the Hungarian town of Tisza-Eszlar a desperate father and mother reported the disappearance without trace of their daughter. All attempts to find fourteen-year-old Eszter Solymosi, a particularly alert and lovable girl, were fruitless. No corpse was washed up on the banks of the Theiss, which has particularly dangerous currents in the region. The case would probably have remained a tragic mystery for all time, had not five-year-old Samuel Scharf, the son of the Jewish synagogue servant, been driven by the voice of his conscience to a terrifying confession. His father, he explained, had together with his older brother Moritz, lain in wait for the innocent girl, dragged her into the synagogue, and there, with the knife ordinarily used for the slaughtering animals, slit her throat. The blood of Christian virgins was known to be used by the Jews in their ancient ritual for the making of Pesach bread. The body of the girl, whose life was so horribly taken from her, was never found, so that the violently disputed trial ended with the acquittal of the synagogue servant, a judgement that provoked great rage in Hungary.’

  A choking sensation rose in Arthur’s throat and filled his mouth with a sour taste. He heard thunder that was meant for him alone. It was his fault. He had known that the Panopticon was not allowed, and he had gone anyway. He had wanted to unveil the forbidden picture, and now he was being punished for it.

  When day appeared, the priests

  Found him extended senseless, pale as death

  Before the pedestal of Isis’ statue.

  There were mysteries, he had always known, things that went on in the shadows, which one only glimpse out of the corners of one’s eye, and which one must on no account turn around to see. And if one did . . .

  His happiness in life had fled for ever

  And his deep sorrow soon conducted him

  to an early grave.

  Every time he was asked to recite that passage, he felt as if it referred to him.

  Again the sky flickered outside. Arthur closed his eyes tight and waited for the thunder as if it were a judgement.

  The man with the bowl of blood was suddenly empty handed, and he was no longer a wax figure: he was Uncle Melnitz, whom Arthur knew so well, even though Papa always said he was dead and buried long ago.

  ‘That’s how it is,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘You will never be quite sure whether the story might not be true after all. Of course it is a lie, you know it is a lie, but if the same lie is told again and again, and believed again and again . . . You will never be quite certain.

  ‘You know Uncle Pinchas, who is also a shochet and has a long knife. You know that he cuts the throats of cows, with a single long slice and without flinching. Cows and calves and sheep and sometimes a chicken. But not children. But not little girls. Not Uncle Pinchas. You know that. You think you know. But you can’t be sure.

  ‘You sat on his knee and he told you stories. About a fish, as big as an island, so big that a ship moored by it and the seamen lit a fire on its back. You liked the story, because you knew it could not be true, that the big fish was made up and couldn’t do anything to you. You knew, but you weren’t sure.’

  Uncle Melnitz was now holding the long knife in his hand.

  ‘It is well known,’ he said, ‘that the blood of Christian virgins is used by Jews to make the Pesach loaves. Well known.’

  He drew the knife, without flinching, along his own throat, and no blood came.

  ‘You have unveiled the picture,’ said Uncle Melnitz, ‘and you will never be able to tell anyone about it. “All that he saw and learned, his tongue ne’er confessed.” You won’t be able to talk about it, and you won’t be able to fight it. Because you’re not sure. You will go to the library at school and you will ask your teacher for the big atlas, you will seek the land of Hungary and the town of Tisza-Eszlar on the Theiss, you will find both, and you will not be sure.’

  It had grown dark behind the canvas walls, but Arthur could still clearly see Uncle Melnitz.

  ‘You will not be able to get rid of the fear,’ said the old man, and had long locks at his temples, ‘the fear that there might be something inside you which you’ve never been aware of, and which is still a part of you. Until it suddenly comes out of you, from one day to the next, and is stronger than you. Eventually. It could be, yes. If everyone tells the story, it could be. Although it isn’t true. Or else it is true. How could you know? How could anyone know?’

  Outside the thunder crashed, like a rock fall or an avalanche, the lengths of canvas bulged inwards, hailstones rattled down like gunshot, as the bullets had rattled at Sedan in Janki’s stories, something sharp caught Arthur in the back of the neck, an ice pick or a knife, a long knife for cutting the throats of cows, and not only cows.

  As was well known.

  He couldn’t find the exit, he couldn’t find the spot where you could simply lift the canvas, in the darkness his face collided with a figure that might have been a torturer or a murderer or a shochet from Tisza-Eszlar, he bumped into a hand that wanted to grab him and hold on to him, he wanted to flee and couldn’t, he crept on all fours over sand and trampled grass, whining and trembling, eventually, somehow, found himself outside, lay with his face in the mud, the storm hammered down on his back and he was grateful for it, it was like a cleansing, he imagined that his jacket was in rags, and his trousers, that his skin was shredded and his trousers, that he was bleeding from a thousand wounds like the martyr in the painted panel, that he was smiling mildly and bravely, but without a halo, because Jews didn’t have such things, that he endured unbearable pains and thus redeemed everything, the truancy and the lying and the curiosity, that he was innocent again, or newly born, or turned into a girl, that he was maybe even dead and they found him and said, ‘He was a good boy, such a good boy.’

  The hail stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Arthur raised his head. The black clouds were fleeing
the sky as if they had a guilty conscience. It was not night, but still bright daylight.

  He drew up his legs and straightened his torso. The hailstones under his knees were hard as gravel. Where the wind had driven them against the canvas of the Panopticon, they were piling up into white cushions.

  He stood up and noticed that he had lost his cap. It was somewhere in the booth, and he would never have the courage to look for it.

  The two horses stood with their legs spread and their heads in between them. They were probably not trying to shelter from the storm any more, however, just rummaging for the remaining oats at the bottom of their feed bags.

  Arthur was hungry.

  In one of the two trucks a lamp burned behind a window, exactly as if it were in a house. He remembered that it was late, that everyone had been waiting for him for ages, and that, drenched and dirty as he was, no one would believe that he was coming from bar mitzvah instruction with Cantor Würzburger.

  But that wasn’t what frightened him most.

  28

  By the time Arthur finally came home, he had come up with an excuse. He had been on his way home from bar mitzvah instruction, exactly, that’s how he would put it, when suddenly a whole gang of boys he’d never seen before jumped out at him from a doorway and beat him up and threw him in the dirt. Of course they would ask him if he recognised the faces, and he would reply: They certainly hadn’t been from his school. They would believe his story, he hoped, because something of the kind had actually happened once before, except that it hadn’t come to blows. They’d just shouted ‘Schiissjud, Schiissjud!’ – ‘Fucking Jew! Fucking Jew!’ and ‘ – ‘Jewboy, Jewboy, fetch your cap, or else pay us seven rapp’!’ They’d taken his cap from him and thrown it from hand to hand while he dashed helplessly and breathlessly after it. He had only told Mama the story; Janki got so cross so quickly, and he himself had felt strangely guilty, as if he had somehow deserved this torment because of some special quality he had. This time, this was the story he had come up with, they had run off with his cap, had put it on the end of a stick and waved it around like a flag. They had also shouted something else while they laid into him, not ‘Judebübli’, but ‘Tisza-Eszlar!’, ‘or something like that’, he would say, he hadn’t really understood. It had all happened so quickly. He had defended himself as best he could . . . No, he had been too scared to put up any resistance; that would make the whole thing properly convincing, he reflected.

  But when he crept into the flat, there was no one there to ask him questions. Only fat Christine heard him coming and pulled him out of the corridor into the kitchen, where the oven was always hot even in summer. There he had to sit down on the bench, and she sat down beside him and rubbed him with a cloth until he had stopped shivering. The cloth smelled of fresh bread.

  The cook, who was otherwise very curious, didn’t want to know why he was only coming back now, dirty and drenched. She didn’t ask where he had left his cap. She just let her hands do the work, as they would have rolled out pastry or tenderised a tough piece of meat, and was meanwhile elsewhere. Suddenly she let go of him, went to the door and opened it a crack. She stood there for a few moments, then she furiously slammed the door close again, and Arthur couldn’t see who she was so furious with. She pulled a handkerchief out of her apron, with the same red and white pattern as the meaty kitchen towels, and loudly blew her nose in it. Arthur couldn’t help thinking of the two horses near the booth, and the way they had buried their heads in their feed bags.

  Then Christine turned to him, looking as if she had just discovered him in her kitchen and wasn’t happy about the discovery. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Arthur said quickly, although it wasn’t true. Little boys who have been beaten up, he had imagined, lose their appetite for ages afterwards.

  Then they sat together in silence. Christine seemed to be listening out for something, she kept lifting her head and lowering it again straight away, as if she’d caught herself doing something forbidden. The kitchen smelled of soup, burnt wood and secrets.

  Then, very slowly, as if time had gone rusty, and was only reluctantly getting going again, the door handle lowered itself. Christine too, it seemed to Arthur, had to struggle from her chair, bend her torso a long way forwards and rest her broad hands on her thighs to get to her feet.

  In the doorway stood Louisli, the young maid, strangely holding a small framed oil painting, Rabbi in the Sukkah, it was called, and it actually belonged on the wall in the corridor.

  Louisli was really still a girl and not a woman. When she brought the breakfast coffee to the table her eyes were sometimes quite red from crying, because she had been homesick for her village during the night again. Now her eyes were wide open. ‘As if she had seen a ghost,’ Arthur thought.

  As if she too had seen a ghost.

  ‘So, what is it now?’ Christine asked.

  ‘I hate him,’ said Louisli.

  ‘They’re really arguing over you?’

  ‘No,’ said Louisli.

  And then something happened that Arthur had only ever seen in very small children: her face folded in on itself, it actually crumpled, she closed her eyes and twisted her mouth as if she had eaten something revoltingly sour, and then she started to wail, quite noisily without warning, just as the hail had begun today, still in the doorway she stood and howled, sobbed with her whole body, the lion from the Panopticon sat inside her and tore her to shreds.

  Christine went over to her, laid a heavy arm around her and drew her into the kitchen. Arthur closed the door. He had the feeling that had to be done right now.

  ‘There, there,’ Christine said consolingly, and again and again, ‘There, there.’ ‘A Jew would say, “Nu, nu,”’ Arthur found himself thinking, and the very difference in the words of consolation represented an unconquerable obstruction between him and the rest of the world.

  The two women were now sitting side by side on the bench by the stove, where Arthur had previously been sitting, and Louisli still clutched the painting as if rocking a new born baby.

  ‘There, there.’ Christine repeated the words regularly and without the slightest impatience, just as she could stir a sauce at an unchanging pace for half an hour until it had exactly the right consistency. Louisli’s face smoothed itself out very gradually; she sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Arthur could clearly see the revolting glistening trail on the black material.

  ‘It’s my own fault,’ said Louisli. ‘I should have known.’ Her body heaved again, but not violently this time, as if the lion were already full and had only bitten her one last time out of habit.

  ‘What should you have known?’ Christine asked. Her voice was quite soft.

  ‘That he was lying to me.’ And then, placing each word as carefully as one places the good porcelain on the table, ‘He said I was the only one for him.’

  Christine laughed, a short, snorting, boxer’s laugh, as if after far too obvious a feint, from which one cannot be lured into dropping one’s guard.

  ‘And he said he loved me.’

  ‘They always say that. I know that one. Men can hurt you very badly.’ Arthur, pressed invisibly into the corner by the door, stared at the cook. He had never heard her say anything like that before, not Christine, who could break a carp’s neck just with her thumb and then, with bloody hands, calmly scoop its guts out of its belly, not fat Christine, who in Mama’s opinion was a pearl precisely because no suitor was ever going to distract her from her duties. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said now, and made a face like Aunt Mimi when she had a migraine, ‘I know men.’

  In spite of all the excitement he had experienced, and the fresh excitement that was happening right now, that was the moment that Arthur would later remember most clearly, ‘the precise moment’, he was still saying fifty years later, ‘when I stopped simply being a child. I realised for the first time, at that exact second, that all the people I knew weren’t there just because of me, but that they had a life of their own
, a life I knew nothing about, and which had absolutely nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I know men,’ said Christine. ‘They’re all the same.’

  ‘He knocked at the door, did young Herr François, I pretended to be asleep, but he just didn’t stop. I put my head under the pillow, but that doesn’t help.’ Louisli said all that in a very small, tearful voice, but Arthur with his fine ear still had the impression that she was enjoying the story, just like the martyr on the panel outside the Panopticon had been happy with his wounds, ‘I only let him in so that he didn’t wake everyone up,’ she even smiled.

  ‘I was awake.’ Christine, like Louisli, had her bedroom in the attic.

  ‘He said he loved me. That he couldn’t sleep because he kept thinking about me. That I was the only one in his life.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Christine, who would never have fallen for such a move.

  ‘And then . . . and then . . .’ Louisli started crying again, but this time the lion was gone.

  ‘Nothing happened,’ said Christine, and although Arthur couldn’t imagine what had gone on between Shmul and Louisli, it was clear to him that that was a lie. Something had happened.

  ‘Have you bled this month?’ Christine asked. And when Lousli nodded through her tears, ‘Then everything’s all right.’

  Arthur, quite confused now, thought once more of the martyr with all his wounds.

  Christine had been speaking comfortingly and attentively to Louisli, but now her tone suddenly changed, just as one doesn’t go on stirring a sauce once it has started to set, and she said quite soberly, ‘So tell me! What’s going on over there?’

  There’s nothing one can do if one has simply been forgotten and then hears things not meant for one’s ears. Christine herself had brought him into the kitchen, and no one had told him that the conversation between the two women was none of his business. If he had cleared his throat or otherwise drawn attention to himself, he could only have disturbed them at a moment when they certainly didn’t want to be disturbed. So Arthur just stayed in his corner and listened.