They hadn’t let him play.
He had wanted to join in with the company of drilling children, with spades over their shoulders and sailors’ caps at an angle, as they all did, he had paid close attention and followed the orders, ‘Right turn!’ and ‘At ease!’ and ‘Pre-sent . . . arms!’, he had done everything right, he’d definitely done everything right, and still the twelve-year-old, who was the officer and who was able to issue whatever orders he liked, had pushed him away and said, ‘Not you.’ Just: ‘Not you.’ And when he had tried to join the ranks again anyway, the elbows had spread and the spade-handles had been used as bayonets, and the officer had grabbed him by the ear and pulled him out of the formation and said, Jews can’t be soldiers.
And now his mother was to come, right now, and tell the others they had to let him join in with the game.
‘I’m sure it’s been over for ages,’ the woman said comfortingly, even though they could still here the jangle of the Turkish crescent. She blew her son’s nose, straightened his sailor’s cap and promised him that Tata would buy him a new spade for the beach, a much, much nicer one.
Then she sighed deeply and said to Chanele with a sad smile, ‘You don’t know how people sometimes treat us Jews.’
‘Me neshuma, I know,’ replied Chanele.
‘You too?’ the woman said with relief. ‘I should have known, with those eyebrows.’
Of course they fell into conversation, and of course they had lots to tell each other. Or rather: the little boy’s mother told Chanele’s lots of things. She was one of those people who are usually quiet out of shyness, but who then, when the person they are talking to proves not to be a threat, let the flow of words surge over the banks like a flood.
Malka Wasserstein came from Marjampol in Galicia, no need to have heard of the town – town? It was a backwater, a fly-speck on the map, nothing at all. Her husband had made a certain amount of money there with a sawmill – ‘We’re no Rothschilds, but God willing we found ourselves very well off’ – and that had caused a problem – ‘A problem? May all Jewish children have such a problem!’ – that would never have occurred to them before: there was no husband for their daughter to be found for far and wide. Little Motti had an elder sister, and he himself had been a latecomer, an afterthought – ‘born when I already thought my time was over. But Riboyne shel Oylem must know what he’s doing.’
Chanele could hardly interject that she too had had a latecomer, and that she sometimes even found herself thinking that Arthur was the nicest of all her children. Malka’s words had spread their elbows too, leaving as little room for other words as the drilling children had for little Motti.
So there was Chaje Sore, almost fifteen years older than her brother – ‘Motti, leave that, we don’t play with things like that!’ – a girl of already twenty-one, God willing, and still unmarried. Of course there had been proposals – ‘The shadchonim overran the house, she could have had anyone in the district, a golden key opens every lock’ – but why should Chaje Sore marry a chandler or a herring trader or – ‘God preserve us!’ – an innkeeper who has to drink l’chayim with every customer and stinks of bronfen by the time he eventually crawls into bed? Not that we thought we were finer than other people – ‘May my tongue fall from my mouth if I ever said such a thing!’ – but one wants the best for one’s children, otherwise why would one break one’s back a whole life long?
‘How many children to you have?’ asked Malka, but didn’t wait for the answer, her sluice-gates were too wide open, but instead reported on how her husband Hersch – ‘I sometimes call him Hershele Ostropoler after the famous jester, because he has such meshuganeh ideas’ – had hit upon the notion of crossing the sea, not for a holiday – ‘I need that like a corpse needs suction cups!’ – but because he wanted to meet people, voyleh Juden, who also had children and who were on the lookout for a shidduch, and who one knew for certain moved in the right circles, precisely because such a summer resort cost a lot of money and not everyone could afford it.
When Malka Wasserstein talked like that, she sounded a bit like a schoolgirl hoping to impress her teachers with undigested phrases from her parents’ conversation. Outwardly, too, she looked like a little girl dressed as a grown-up, because – only in Marjampol could it have been considered elegant – she had chosen a street dress of very colourful, broad-striped silk fabric that swathed her chubby figure like casually tied-up wrapping paper. With it she wore a hat with a heron-feather, which Chanele would never have sold anyone for afternoon wear; heron feathers belonged in the ballroom, where it was this season’s fashion to let it bob along when dancing the tango.
But much more than her clothes, it was her movements that made Malka’s origins in the Galician provinces unmistakeable. She talked with her hands, and with her gestures even the story of her holiday turned into a dramatic event.
So they had set off – ‘The cost! The bother!’ – but of course Hersch hadn’t looked into everything in advance, he always liked to get things done quickly, he plunged into everything he did like a bridegroom into a mikvah, and he had actually booked their holiday on Borkum, Borkum of all places! Did Chanele have any idea how they did things there?
No, she could have no idea, and she should thank God that she didn’t! He had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, but he must have overlooked Borkum, because that place was far, far worse than the two biblical cities, an island full of reshoim. Malka never wished harm on anyone, but if a flood came and washed the whole pile of sand into the sea, she at least wouldn’t weep a tear for it, and when she passed the graves of the people, she would dance on them, yes, she would dance.
On Borkum the following had happened . . .
But now Malka had been so busy telling her stories that she had forgotten the time, and she had only left the spa concert very quickly to go in search of Hersch and Chaje Sore, she had thought that her Motti – ‘Put that down, Motti, who knows who else might have picked it up!’ – was playing peacefully with the other children, you never had a moment’s peace, and why people went on holiday for pleasure she would never know, even if she were to live, touch wood, to a hundred and twenty.
They would absolutely have to meet again, her husband would want to thank Chanele for her kindness in person, and who knows, perhaps Chanele might even know someone who . . . How old had she said her youngest was, the latecomer? Thirty-three? Then it was high time he thought of getting married. ‘Being alone puts stupid ideas in your head!’ Yes, they would certainly see each other again, tomorrow would be best of all, but now Malka had to go and look for her husband and her daughter. They had wanted to sit down in the patisserie garden, where you could see and be seen, but all the tables there had been occupied, they must have gone somewhere else and were bound to be wondering where she’d got to, she would really have to go. ‘Shake hands with the lady like a good boy, Mottele! You must be moichel to him, he’s all over the place today, normally he’s quite well-behaved.’
When Chanele came back to the hotel room, Janki was lying on the bed with his dirty shoes on, fast asleep. He was snoring and smelled of beer.
43
Janki didn’t mind Chanele leaving him alone; in fact it suited him. His new friends – by now he also knew their names: Hofmeister, Neuberth, Kessler and von Stetten – took up all his time, almost around the clock. They expected him at eleven o’clock in the morning, when one had barely struggled out of bed, for a buffet breakfast, where one had to eat smoked eel – treyf, but not at all bad – and other fatty things because it was traditionally believed that they more than anything else helped to absorb the alcohol from the previous evening, and then, to clear their heads, they went for a healthy walk along the beach, but they never got any further than the Strandcafé, where they were already expected and their beers were served without them even asking for them. There, over the course of the next few hours, they became first patriotic and then emotional, they sang under the direction of Neuberth, who was a member of a men�
�s singing club, romantic songs so mellifluous that they were moved to tears: ‘In the tower at Sedan a Frenchman stands, clutching his rifle in his hands.’ But they were never again as drunk as they had been on the first day; they saved that up for the evening. They said their goodbyes at the door of their hotels, none of which were nearly as smart as the Atlantic, as elaborately as if they weren’t going to see each other again for years, when in fact they were only parting for the duration of the table d’hôte where, each in his own price category, they lined their stomachs ready for a night spent drinking in Tacke Blecken’s Cellar. The place was otherwise avoided by the spa guests, because in this drinking den, the last refuge of locals and sailors, one occasionally came across ladies whose faded charms might only have seduced a seafarer who hadn’t set foot on dry land for many months. They had commandeered the round table for the duration, right under Tacke Blecken’s celebrated chandelier consisting of an old model galleon and a set of elk antlers. Tacke, who was said once to have been a captain, until he had run his cutter aground on a reef while three sheets to the wind, poured a drink that might have been called grog, but which contained, along with rum, sugar and water, other ingredients that made one seriously philosophical after the first glass.
Apart from a few hasty adventures on business trips, Janki’s life had never presented him with the opportunity to let his hair down properly like this. All the greater then was his enjoyment of his late-blossoming bachelor life, he called for one round after another, and was in the meantime able to give such a detailed account of his experiences at Sedan that the battle would have had to last three days to include them all. So he thought he remembered – and each glass of grog made the memory clearer – how he had rescued an injured comrade from enemy fire at great risk to his own life, and from whom he had later received the walking stick with the lion’s-head handle by way of thanks, a distinction, he claimed, that was far more precious to him than any medal that the state might have been able to award him.
Of course the others noticed that he was exaggerating, but they weren’t bothered; they were doing exactly the same thing themselves. The Wound Badge awarded to Hofmeister, for example, which he always wore proudly on the lapel of his coat on Sedan Day, a picture of King Karl of Württemberg with the caption ‘For loyal duty in war’, was really a simple silver medal of the kind that was generously distributed at a time of general triumph. Hofmeister, a cosy innkeeper from Nürtingen, had been part of a supply unit in the war, and as he stood over his cooking pots had heard nothing more of the whole battle than the distant roar of cannon. Why should he have doubted other people’s accounts of the battle, as long as they didn’t call his own heroism into question?
Von Stetten, the oldest of the group, was the only one of them to have been an officer at Sedan, a dashing lieutenant, as he put it who, if he hadn’t been so discreet, could have told them stories about his conquests with the ladies, ‘it would make your hair curl, gentlemen!’ He had preserved the custom from those days of twirling his moustache at the conclusion of each sentence, so that the ends stood up like confirmatory exclamation marks.
Every night they drank Tacke Blecken’s mysterious grog, smoked the cigars that Janki was allowed to bring and, behind a curtain of smoke and male laughter – ‘Ha!’ – they created their own world, into which only warriors were allowed, no civilians and certainly no women.
Chanele, for her part was not unhappy to see her husband occupied, although the stench of smoke and grog that he brought into the room in the early morning was thoroughly repellent. But that was a small price to pay for the fact that she was free of the need not just to be in a summer resort, but also of having to play the role of the summer resort guest. By the time Janki rolled out of bed with a hangover, she had long since put on one of her simple Liberty dresses in which she felt most comfortable, had had breakfast and left the hotel.
She even discovered a new passion for which she had never in her life found time: the Atlantic had a reading room, and there she picked a book from the shelf at random, a different one every day, took it with her to the water, sat down in her wicker beach chair and enjoyed the luxury of problems and entanglements that one could snap shut and set aside whenever one wished. So even though she wasn’t aware of it, she spent her holiday much as Janki did: in a world that didn’t really exist.
But her peace was repeatedly disturbed by the Wassersteins, who had set up their rented beach chairs – not one, not two, but three! – in her immediate vicinity, and were firmly resolved not only to nurture Chanele’s acquaintance, but to appropriate it entirely to themselves.
Hersch Wasserstein was smaller than his wife, a squat, curly-haired bundle of energy. On this beach spending time in the water was not considered truly healthy, but still he wore a black bathing costume all the time, from whose neck curly chest hair sprouted, and a straw hat with a coloured ribbon of the kind sold in all the souvenir shops of Westerland. His arms and legs were burnt bright red, but in spite of his wife’s warnings he never spent long in the shadow of his beach chair, and was instead constantly doing something, either fetching glasses of lemonade – ‘You have one too, Frau Meijer, do me the honour!’ – or helping Motti set up a water wheel in the moat of his sandcastle, exactly the same system, incidentally – ‘This is bound to interest you, Frau Meijer!’ – on which the sawmill in Marjampol operated.
His wife, who had talked away at Chanele the first time they met as if words were going to double in price the following day, said little in her husband’s presence. Apart from, ‘What do you mean, Hersch?’ and ‘Quite right, Hersch!’ she was hardly ever heard. But that was still more than her daughter said.
Chaje Sore Wasserstein was insulted, not for any concrete reason, but in principle. The lemonade wasn’t cold enough, the sand too hot, the young men one met here no better than the ones in Marjampol – and she said all that without words, she just let the corners of her mouth droop, studied her fingernails and groaned every now and again as if the whole world had conspired to turn her twenty-one-year-old life into a living hell. From childhood onwards her parents had assured her that things would get better, and Chaje Sore Wasserstein was of the view that they certainly had not kept their promise.
Hersch was a very talkative man and insisted on telling Chanele in great detail about all the dreadful things they had experienced in their first resort of Borkum. Little Motti’s sandcastle had been trampled to pieces, there had been a map on the wall of their hotel showing the route from Borkum to Jerusalem, a brazen message to them that they should go there and not come back, and at the spa concert everyone had sung a song, the Borkum song, whose last lines he would never forget if he lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, God willing. ‘But those who approach you with flat feet,’ they had sung, ‘with noses crooked and curly hair, they should not enjoy your beach, away with them, away with them!’ They had left very quickly, they had fled, in fact, to be honest, and here on Sylt it was really much better, ‘don’t you think, Frau Meijer?’
Chanele would have preferred to withdraw behind her book, but the insistent attention of her new acquaintances repeatedly kept her from doing so. Sometimes when she dozed off for a few minutes in the midday heat, characters from the two worlds merged, a Bedouin prince from an adventure story assumed the features of Hersch Wasserstein, and the beautiful countess that he was holding prisoner had the same pinched little mouth as Chaje Sore.
Janki dreamed too, or rather: the six musketeers, as they called themselves, pursued a common dream. They couldn’t remember which of them had had the idea first, most likely it had been Staudinger, who was something like the chairman of their association. For days now they had all been weaving away at it and, inspired by beer and grog, drawing ever brighter colours through the beautiful picture. In Westerland, they knew from before, 2 September was decked with bunting in honour of Sedan Day, and the mayor laid a wreath for the fallen on the victory monument, but was that really enough for such an important day? T
he fact that the hotels decorated their dining rooms in black, white and red, and the chefs invented new patriotic names for their old recipes – Hofmeister, who knew about such things, remembered very ordinary Büsum shrimps which had appeared on the table bearing the name ‘Field Marshal Moltke prawns’ – that the spa band had played patriotic tunes and that the battle flag had flown on many a sandcastle, that was all well and good, but not enough for true veterans, who had risked life and limb in that battle.
‘Someone’, Staudinger said, ‘should organise a central event, with speeches and honours . . .’
‘. . . and’, Kessler went on toying with the idea, ‘hire a hall in a hotel . . .’ and of course Janki cried, ‘In the Atlantic, where else?’ There was in fact a big ballroom there, where meetings and dances were held, and the manager – ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to it!’ – was sure to make it available to them, the spa newspaper would publish big advertisements, the house band would play something dignified rather than the inevitable tangos – ‘The Hohenfriedberg March’, suggested the musical Neuberth, ‘composed by Old Fritz in person’ – the war veterans would march into those sounds and then . . . Yes, they weren’t quite clear about what would happen then, so they ordered the next round of Tacke Blecken’s mysterious grog, rested their heads on their hands and gave it some thought.
‘I have given it some thought,’ said Hersch Wasserstein, ‘and in fact it could all be done very quickly and without any fuss.’ He had sent his family on a walk and was now kneeling in the sand beside Chanele’s beach chair, as Sir Walter Raleigh knelt before the throne of Queen Elizabeth in the book she was just reading. ‘How do you like my Chaje Sore?’
‘Charming, quite charming,’ said Chanele, for where does it say in the Shulchan Aruch that you are supposed to rob a proud father of his illusions?
Melnitz Page 47
