Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  Arthur wanted to give her a hug, but she pulled away and looked at him searchingly. ‘Where is my father?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean Uncle Salomon?’

  ‘My father’s name isn’t Salomon.’ She beckoned him over, as one does when one wants to confide a particularly secret secret in someone. ‘His name is Menachem.’

  There was no one in the family called Menachem.

  ‘Menachem Bär.’

  ‘Bär?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chanele. ‘Bär, Bär, Bär, Bär.’

  ‘The journey must have taken its toll,’ thought Arthur.

  ‘And do you know what he’s doing?’ Chanele giggled, a little girl telling a rude joke that she doesn’t really understand. ‘He dies. He dies every day.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the home, Mama.’

  Chanele shook his hand away. She felt more clear and alive than she had for ages, and she didn’t want that to be cut short. ‘Menachem Bär,’ she said. ‘It’s a secret, but you’re old enough to learn it. After all, my father is your . . . your . . .’ She closed her eyes firmly, trying so hard to think the idea through to the end, but she couldn’t work out how her father could be related to her son. ‘His name is Menachem Bär,’ she repeated at last, and was glad to be quite sure about one point, ‘and my mother’s name is Sarah. Menachem and Sarah. Menachem and Sarah.’ She started singing again, one name in a high note, the other in a low one, and even stamped her foot on the hard ground as if she were about to start dancing.

  He would have to get her back to the home soon.

  ‘It’s too cold for you here, Mama,’ he said. She didn’t hear him.

  ‘You can tell your children,’ said Chanele and patted his hand. ‘You need to know where you come from. One of them always marched up and down with a rifle. But it wasn’t a real rifle. Dr Hellstiedl says none of them are dangerous.’

  Arthur took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his knows. He knew the doctors who looked after the inmates of the old people’s home, and none of them was called Hellstiedl.

  ‘There were poplars on either side,’ said Chanele, ‘and it was hot. It’s easier if you count your footsteps. Forty-five. Forty-six. A million.’

  ‘I’m sure lunch will be ready at the home.’

  ‘One of them raked the leaves.’ Chanele had started giggling again. ‘But there were no leaves.’

  He tried to lead his mother to the way out, but she resisted, as violently as before, when the waitress tried to take her table cloth away. ‘We haven’t been to his grave yet,’ she said. ‘He’s celebrating Bris there. Dr Hellstiedl is invited too. They’re going to have a party, and everyone will sing. Menachem and Sarah. Menachem and Sarah. Menachem and Sarah.’

  At last, because there was no other way of calming her down, he led her to a strange grave, it must have been one of the first in the cemetery, because the stone was weathered and half sunk into the ground. Perhaps it was one of the ones rescued from the old Judenäule in the Rhine. The inscription had long been overgrown with moss, and could no longer be deciphered.

  ‘Here, Mama. This is the grave of Menachem and Sarah.’

  ‘You see.’ Chanele had the triumphant expression of someone who has been proved right. ‘You wanted to lie to me. They all want to lie to me, but I know.’ She bent down to the ground, she did it all by herself, even though it was hard for her, picked up a pebble and set it down on the strange grave. ‘If you touch him,’ she said, ‘his skin is like paper.’

  Then she accepted his help, let him lead her back to the car and would probably have liked to be picked up and carried. Arthur wouldn’t even have found that very difficult. There was not much left of his mother.

  On the way back she sang both songs at the same time, ‘Ruben, Lea, Rachel’ and ‘Menachem and Sarah’. Arthur could not have said what made him sadder, that she didn’t recognise her grandchildren, or that she remembered a father she had never had.

  Back at the old people’s home he took off her coat and Chanele sat down, rubbing her hands against each other, at one of the empty tables. ‘It will soon be breakfast,’ she said. ‘My treat. Why didn’t you bring the children?’

  56

  It was an act of stupidity, of course it was, a loutish prank which one could not tolerate as headmaster, but it was also the kind of loutish prank that would be transformed within ten or twenty years into a heroic deed, something that you could tell and tell again at the old-boys’ table, before clapping the boys who hadn’t had the chance to see such things sympathetically on the shoulder and saying, ‘Ah yes, that’s the kind of thing we used to get up to in the good old Strickhof.’

  So Headmaster Gerster struggled to maintain a severe expression and gave the pair a stern talking-to. They would be ruthlessly expelled from the school, both of them, if ever, just once, he heard the slightest thing. He would drive them both firmly into the ground. And besides: they should be ashamed of themselves, because the things that could have come of such a piece of coltish nonsense – what was he saying, coltish, a colt had far more intelligence than the two of them put together! – the things that could have happened hadn’t even occurred to them. They probably both thought the Lord God had given them their heads to smoke cigars with rather than to think.

  Böhni, standing to attention, a great lump of a young man, let the storm pass over him. He was wearing short trousers, as he did in almost all weathers, and had even rolled up the sleeves of his grey shirt. And the schoolroom wasn’t heated, it was Sunday, and at agricultural college you don’t have money to burn. Gerster had been sitting comfortably at home in the warm parlour, chatting to a visitor, when the phone had rung, just as his wife was serving up the plum tart.

  The young hooligans!

  Böhni’s face had reddened slightly, Gerster noticed, but certainly not because he was ashamed, and not because of the cold either. He always looked like that. It made Headmaster Gerster, who liked to theorise about physiognomy and body language, think he was short-tempered.

  That Rosenthal, on the other hand . . . He couldn’t work that boy out at all. The fact that he wanted to study agriculture, of all things, when no one else in his family had anything to do with it. There was only supposed to have been one cattle trader in the family, or at least that was what Rosenthal had told him. But his father was a scholar, and they usually sent their sons to the Gymnasium, and farming wasn’t really in the blood of the Jews. He was a hard worker, you had to give him that, even though he had to learn a few things that the others had known from childhood. The way he’d picked up the scythe the first time, as if it was going to bite him! They had also laughed long and hard at him for that. He took their jibes in good part, and never even complained about the blisters on his fine city-boy hands. Headmaster Gerster liked students who gritted their teeth. Agriculture wasn’t crocheting.

  His stance was quite different from the other boy’s as well. Arms folded and legs far apart, they way you stand when you want to say, ‘No one knocks me over, just him try.’ Not exactly challenging, he couldn’t be accused of that, but he certainly was hard-headed. He was the kind of person who didn’t put up with any nonsense, and that was how the unfortunate matter had come about.

  ‘Idiots!’ yelled Herr Gerster. ‘Snot-nosed brats!’ But his heart wasn’t really in his lecture. What that Rosenthal had done was one hell of a thing.

  It was this: even though they had their own mechanised testing station, they didn’t set much store by modern technology at the Strickhof. Kudi Lampertz, the deputy head who also taught arable farming, even raged against the modern fad for tractors – ‘As if a small farmer in Säuliamt could afford such an expensive thing!’ – and insisted on his students continuing to learn to plough with a four-in-hand, even if it looked a little old-fashioned, particularly on the Strickhof farm where the city had grown so much that the agricultural college was now in the middle of residential buildings. They hadn’t been able to resist buying a truck for ever, but one old tradition ha
d survived: on Sunday, when there wasn’t much traffic in town, they hitched up two horses and transported the milk-cans on the box-cart to the association dairy. The task was in great demand. A coachman like that, with a coloured ribbon on his whip, cut a fine figure, and if you whistled at girls from the high box, hardly any of them turned away insulted.

  Today the job had fallen to Walter Böhni and Hillel Rosenthal, Böhni because he had learned to drive a coach on his parents’ farm, and Rosenthal because he wanted to practise. They put the more and less experienced students together for the sake of camaraderie, and also because the Canton never provided enough teaching posts.

  So no one else had been there, but Gerster’s knowledge of human nature allowed him to imagine how it might have happened. Of course Böhni had acted the expert, and set himself up as the man in charge, had given the new boy the lowly job of curry-combing the horses and chewed his head off when the stencil slipped and the checker-board pattern on its crop wasn’t clearly visible. He would also have kindly assigned him the task of harnessing up, but then of course he would have taken the reins himself and played the big master-coachman, all the way across Schaffhauserplatz and the Kornhaus Bridge. On Langstrasse, Gerster didn’t even need to ask, and Böhni wouldn’t have admitted it either, he had doubtless crossed the Railway Bridge at a thundering gallop. That was expressly forbidden, but they all did it, and you can’t be that strict with grown adults.

  But then again . . .

  ‘Riff-raff!’ shouted Gerster. ‘Damned day labourers!’ ‘Day labourers’ was more or less the worst curse you could hurl at a farmer’s son, and Böhni actually flinched. Rosenthal, the city-dweller, didn’t bat an eyelid.

  Then the following had happened outside the dairy: when the full milk churns had been offloaded and the empty ones loaded on – Böhni would generously have allowed his companion to perform that task too – and Rosenthal was to take the reins for the return journey, Böhni had probably needled him a bit too much, or rather prodded him with a pitchfork, because delicate weapons were not his style. What had been said, and whether it had concerned a lack of horse sense or something entirely different, neither Böhni nor Rosenthal wished to confess, and Herr Gerster was basically satisfied with that. Some things are better sorted out in private, with fists. It certainly had something to do with the fact that Rosenthal was a Jew, and that Böhni was wearing a grey shirt, not exactly like the ones worn by members of the fascist Fröntler movement, but the same colour, so at any rate Rosenthal felt obliged to demonstrate his skill as a driver, so he took the team back to the Strickhof not by the prescribed, direct route, but . . .

  ‘Stupid oafs!’ yelled Gerster, and even he realised that this last insult had sounded a bit feeble.

  He had driven right into the centre of the city, that lunatic, which of course wasn’t allowed at all. And Böhni had let him do it, had just let him run headlong into disaster, rather than assuming responsibility as the more experienced of the pair. Responsibility! But then that was a word that had probably been scrapped from their dictionary. That they had had more luck than intelligence and nothing really serious had happened was a matter beyond their control, which meant that they were both equally culpable, regardless of who was holding the reins in the end. Cling together, swing together.

  Herr Gerster couldn’t even think, he raged, about how it would have reflected on the school and on himself if things had gone badly, all the reports that people would have had to write, and the explanations. And, almost worst of all, the people who had been trying to move the Strickhof away from the city for such a long time, who wanted to win building land where there were now only fields and orchards, they would have had their arguments served up to them on a plate, there it was again, they had said, plain as your face, an agricultural business and a big city, the two things just don’t go together.

  He looked for a sufficiently violent insult, couldn’t find one and instead brought the flat of his hand down on his desk, so that it echoed around the empty room like a cannon-shot. A headmaster’s life was far from easy.

  And at home they would be eating up all that delicious plum tart.

  The lout had ridden around the back to the station and then crossed to the other side and into Bahnhofstrasse, which was wide enough for him to have negotiated if necessary, but then he had suddenly turned off to the left into Rennweg, and then into Fortunagasse, which was so narrow that even the King of England’s personal coachman would have thought twice.

  ‘Why did you go there, of all places?’ roared Gerster, and Rosenthal spread his arms and said, ‘No reason.’

  That was, of course, a lie. Hillel hadn’t taken that path by chance at all, but he wasn’t going to let Gerstli – as the headmaster was secretly known – in on that one. In Fortunagasse was the ‘Beth Hechalutz’, a house in which two dozen young pioneers, the Chaluzim, were waiting for the opportunity to be able to travel on to Palestine. They were all refugees, Germans and Poles expelled from Germany; they lived there as a collective, exactly as it would be later in the kibbutz, they paid the bit of money that they had earned somewhere into a kitty, cooked in a communal kitchen and went on talking until far into the night about how they would build a Jewish state, and a socialist one at that. On Sunday, Hillel knew, they would all be at home, it was too cold to go for a walk and no one could afford to go to the café.

  All of them – that is: even a certain Malka Sofer from Warsaw, who was already twenty-two and thus unattainable for a seventeen-year-old, but who had beautiful black curls and a very serious face on which Hillel would have loved to put a smile. But for that to happen, she would have had to notice him, and what better means could there be to that end than to drive past her in a coach, so to speak, with a team of horses and a coloured ribbon on his whip?

  He had planned to stop on the Rennweg, where, a bit further on, even an unpractised driver could have turned his team without much difficulty. There was a big brass bell fixed to the box, the kind they have on ships; the police demanded a warning signal in traffic, and a horn really wouldn’t have been right on a horse-drawn vehicle. He would ring the bell, he had worked out, and then everyone in the Beth Hechalutz would look out of the window, even Malka, he would wave nonchalantly with his whip and then later, when they met on their own – he was already working out plans about how he would organise this – they would have an ice-breaker, and once something has begun there is always the possibility that it might continue.

  But when he looked into Fortunagasse, there was a group of men, ten or twenty, in such haste it was impossible to count them. From up there on the box you could look out on everything as if from a balcony, they were wearing their grey Fröntler shirts, and stood there in rank and file, looking almost military. They also had their flag with them, the white bars of the Swiss cross extended to the edge against the red background. They were standing outside the house of the Chaluzim and shouting something that Hillel couldn’t, or wouldn’t, at first understand. It was a very simple line, which they were shouting over and over again: ‘Get back to Poland, damn your eyes!’ One of them had a landsknecht field drum, and was striking out the beat on it. They were demonstrating against his people, and Böhni sat next to him and had a great grin on his face that seemed to say, ‘You’re in the shit not just because you took a forbidden detour, but just generally!’

  Hillel hadn’t thought, he hadn’t thought at all, in that respect Gerstli was completely right, he had just tugged on the reins and shouted ‘Giddy-up!’ and somehow done everything right, better than he had ever managed in the practice yard. The horses had turned into the Fortunagasse, had started galloping on the thoroughfare that was far too narrow for them, he had struck at them with his whip and rung the bell like the fire service in an emergency. The Fröntlers had scattered, into people’s doorways and against the wall where it goes up to the Lindenhof. The flag-bearer dropped his bit of cloth, and how the drummer and his drum managed to get to safety Hillel couldn’t quite say. But no one
had been hurt, otherwise they wouldn’t have been standing in front of the headmaster right now getting a telling off, they would have been told to pack their things together long ago.

  ‘Even that would have been worth it,’ thought Hillel.

  He had had no time to look up, so he didn’t know whether the Chaluzim had really been standing at the window, and whether Malka had been there. It had all happened far too quickly, he had just had time to hold on to the reins and hold back the horses. It had happened and nothing could be done about it, they were past the house, and in their wake the first of them were already shaking menacing fists. Only then did it occur to him that you can’t keep going at the end of Fortunagasse, because there’s just that steep path off to the left, the one with the steps that leads down to the Limmat. He had tugged like mad on the reins, had tried somehow to stop the horses, but the nags had long since developed a mind of their own and could no longer be controlled, at least not by him. And Böhni, who might have been able to do something, sat there petrified with fear, his eyes wide open and his mouth as well, as if he wanted to scream and couldn’t remember how to do it.

  Then, quite naturally, the horses had turned off to the left all by themselves, at a perfect, even gallop of the kind that you learn at coach-driving school, except that the pupils there would never have been allowed to take a bend so sharply, and certainly not at that speed. The cart leaned to the side, it balanced on only two wheels and would have tipped over had the passage not been so narrow that it scraped along a bay window on the ground floor and righted itself again. At the back, an empty milk churn fell from the cart, and then the wheels were already clattering down the steps, bumping so hard with each one that they were nearly thrown from the box.

  Somehow the cart managed to come to a standstill, Hillel couldn’t have said how. Perhaps Kudi Lampertz was right when he said, as he always did, ‘Just let the horses get on with it, they’re cleverer than you are.’ All of a sudden it was completely still. Only the milk churn rolled very slowly from step to step behind them, clanking as if calling out, ‘Wait for me, I’m coming!’