Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘If a tailor is what you need, then I’m a tailor,’ said the man.

  ‘Can you sew?’

  ‘I can learn.’

  ‘Like that? From one day to the next?’

  ‘If necessary, yes.’

  ‘How hard do you imagine it is?’

  ‘There are harder things.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Rachel, and because the man was so much bigger than she was and she didn’t want to do the koved for him, to stand up, she bobbed up and down on her office chair. ‘We don’t take on untrained staff here.’

  He laughed. No, he didn’t laugh. He produced a noise that could have been a laugh if a laugh could be pickled, stored in the cellar and eventually, if there was nothing else in the house, taken back out again.

  ‘Believe me, Fräulein,’ he said. ‘I can do anything anyone asks of me. I’m a skilled practitioner.’

  Rachel didn’t like being called ‘Fräulein’. She always suspected concealed mockery behind the word, along the lines of: ‘Soon be forty, and still no husband.’

  The visitor was hard to guess. He could be fifty. Or less. Not that she was interested.

  ‘What do you actually expect me to do for you?’

  ‘You could ask my name,’ said the man. ‘I’m called Grün.’

  ‘Grün and what else?’

  ‘Grünberg, Grünfeld, Grünbaum. Pick one.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  There was nothing unusual about him, apart from his oversized suit. No one would have thrown him out of a Jewish simcha; with a face like that he would have been mishpocha in any house. And there were crow’s feet around his eyes, even if Rachel hadn’t yet seen him smiling yet. Nothing unusual.

  The craziest people always look the most normal, she had read somewhere.

  ‘In fact, Herr Grün, I just wanted to know your first name.’

  ‘Felix,’ said the man. ‘Isn’t that a good joke?’

  ‘What’s so funny about it?’

  ‘Felix means “happy”.’

  She couldn’t make him out at all, and that alone made her dislike him. Either a person can sew or they can’t; you don’t just turn up hat in hand and get a job straight away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Herr Grün, but . . .’

  ‘You aren’t sorry,’ the man said without a hint of reproach. ‘You even enjoy it. Not much, but you do. I’m familiar with this. Maybe I’d be exactly the same if I had power over other people.’

  ‘Why power?’

  ‘You have work, I need work.’

  ‘You’re not a tailor.’

  ‘I can pretend to be one. Remarkably realistic. Like your hair.’

  The cheek.

  ‘What about my hair?’

  ‘You should mix a little black coffee in with the paste, then the henna won’t be so bright. I know that from a work colleague.’

  ‘And what sort of work is that supposed to be? Know-all?’ This man was making her simply furious.

  ‘She was in the same field as me,’ said Herr Grün. ‘When I still had a job. Well, yes’ – he sighed, and the sigh came from the cellar, from some pickling jar where his feelings were stored – ‘well, yes, tailor isn’t the worst thing in the world. If you like I can start straight away.’

  ‘There’s nothing here for you,’ said Rachel, and noticed with some irritation that her voice had grown shrill.

  ‘No, there is,’ said Herr Grün. ‘There’s work here, and I need work. So I’ll wait till someone gives me some.’

  ‘I’ve told you . . .’

  ‘You’re not the boss here.’ He didn’t say even that unpleasantly. ‘I’ve learned to recognise such things. You’re put in command, but you can’t really give orders.’

  ‘How do you think you know that?’ She couldn’t choke back the question, even though one shouldn’t really debate with such people.

  ‘You make too much of an effort,’ said Herr Grün.

  Then he went and stood against the wall, without leaning against it, he didn’t ask for a chair, he didn’t ask when the boss would be there, he just stood there and waited. Each time someone came in he looked at him for a moment and always knew straight away that he wasn’t yet the right one. Even when Joni Leibowitz came back from a customer and complained loudly about the fact that the replacement buttons on a delivery of ladies’ coats had not been sewn in, even though that was what he had expressly requested, and who had to listen to the buyers’ complaints? He did! – even then Herr Grün only turned his head briefly and then sank back in on himself, a man who has done a lot of waiting, and for whom another few hours won’t matter.

  Zalman had an appointment at the bank. He didn’t like going there, but he had no alternative; the more successful a company became, the more money it seemed to need. They had been extremely polite to him, and the clerk in charge had not only authorised credit for the purchase of a special button machine, but even congratulated him: he was doing everything quite correctly. Now, as long as the work force was cheap and the unions had no objections to make, one would have to start setting the markers; he would see how they started crawling out of their holes at the first sign of a recovery. In the interest of the company Zalman hadn’t been able to contradict him, and that level of self-control alone, he thought, would have been worth a director’s salary.

  The man who had waited so long took a step forward when Zalman came in, like a soldier when the order to that effect has been given. ‘You are the boss here,’ she said.

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘My name is Grün.’

  ‘Papa, I told him we weren’t taking on untrained workers, but he insisted on waiting for you anyway, Papa.’ Rachel would have liked to weave a third ‘Papa’ into the sentence. She was more than happy for this Herr Grün to know that she was the managing director’s daughter.

  Zalman looked at the man. A refugee, of course, the world was full of refugees. The suit was good English fabric, so someone who had enjoyed better days. That counted against him, not because one should be ashamed of losing one’s possessions, but because people who were once rich generally don’t make good workers. You could teach the hands to do something, was his experience, but not the head. The suit, Zalman saw things like this at first sight, was made to measure, but for a much fatter man than Grün. So he must have been through some terrible things; that too wasn’t a rare thing for a Jew coming from Germany.

  ‘What’s your profession?’

  ‘Whatever is needed.’

  ‘He isn’t a tailor, Papa.’

  ‘I haven’t always been a refugee, either,’ said Herr Grün. ‘But I’ve learned it quickly.’

  ‘You must understand,’ said Zalman, and for the second time that day cursed the fact that he had to be the managing director here. ‘You must understand: twenty people come here every week. If I wanted to employ them all . . .’

  ‘Give me five minutes,’ said Herr Grün.

  A real company director would have left him standing. But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and Zalman had long lived according to the principle that you should give everyone a hearing before you say no to him.

  ‘All right, then, five minutes.’

  The two men disappeared into the manager’s room, which was only really a cupboard, separated from the office by thin plaster walls. The door closed behind them, and Rachel raised her eyes to the ceiling in ostentatious despair.

  Joni Leibowitz had observed the scene and was now, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, leaning on Rachel’s desk. She didn’t like the fact that he still took for granted a familiarity between them that had long ceased to exist.

  ‘I bet you a bottle of wine that he’ll take him on.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘He’ll never take him on, or you never bet?’

  ‘Both.’ She had asked him several times not to use the intimate form of address with her in the office.

  Joni let the ash from his cigarette drop into the hollow of his hand, a habit that Rachel tho
ught was impossible, and then clapped his hands clean over the waste paper basket. ‘Would you like one?’ he asked, and held out the open case. It was made of electrum, but he hoped people would assume it was silver.

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Then the stubs with the traces of lipstick that I keep finding in the packing room must come from someone else.’

  He grinned at her. Joni was a person who liked digging out secrets because he enjoyed the power that they gave him over others.

  Having fun with power? That strange Herr Grün had said exactly the same thing about her.

  ‘Might I be allowed to carry on with my work?’ she said severely.

  ‘I don’t want to stop you.’ He let his cigarette butt fall into the waste paper basket – another of his typically reckless habits – and went outside. In the past, but that was now a very long time ago, Rachel had found his pointedly casual strolling gait actually quite attractive.

  It took longer than five minutes, at least half an hour. Only then did the door of the manager’s office open, and the two men came out.

  ‘Herr Grün will start here tomorrow,’ said Zalman. ‘Somebody please show him how to operate a sewing machine.’

  58

  Arthur’s surgery was closed every second Wednesday. His receptionist, the elderly Fräulein Salvisberg, turned all his patients away and he drove to Heiden to do a free consultation at the Jewish children’s home, the Wartheim.

  The journey to Appenzell would have been equally pleasant by train – Arthur had been particularly taken with the little cog railway that climbed the gentle slopes from Rorschach – but if the weather permitted he preferred to get into his little Fiat. What’s the point of having a car of your own if you don’t use it? However, it was almost embarrassing to him that he enjoyed this part of his voluntary work so much; his over-eager conscience was of the opinion that one could only take credit for a good deed if one had also suffered for it.

  The fact that the Wartheim was forced to bring in a doctor from Zurich had to do with money, or rather with a lack of money. For the private children there were enough doctors in the village, and if they couldn’t provide a diagnosis, a specialist was called in for them from St Gallen. A child was considered private if his parents paid the full costs, which only Swiss people could do, and not all of those. The ‘official children’ whose lodging was paid for by a state agency for reasons of poverty, had a claim to medical treatment, although local doctors prudently guarded against diagnosing any illnesses that would have required costly treatment. The problem was the ‘women’s association children’, most of them wards of court who required support from the Union of Jewish Women’s Associations because their parents had stopped sending money, either because they had none left, or because the constantly tightening exchange regulations made regular transfers impossible. The children weren’t allowed to starve, of course not, but even though they were required to fill every school-free minute with menial work, and thus earned at least part of their keep, they were still a burden, and there was never enough money for unusual expenses such as visits to the doctor.

  Arthur hadn’t needed to be asked twice to take on the job. ‘If I said no, I would feel as if I was playing truant from school,’ he had said to Hinda, and his sister had replied, ‘No, Arthur, what you’re playing truant from is life.’

  The journey was quick today, and in Heiden he even had time to call in at the Schützengarten for half an hour. His Zurich dialect sounded exotic in Appenzell, and when he ordered a coffee he was immediately marked down as an outsider. Here they drank beer at all times of day, or a nice glass of red wine.

  Two pipe-smoking men were sitting at the regulars’ table talking about politics. They were united in their noisy conviction that Hitler wouldn’t survive for long in Germany. He had picked a fight with international Jewry, and that was always a mistake.

  On the steep road that led from the village to the children’s home Arthur drove too quickly and nearly missed the entrance.

  Fräulein Württemberger, the director of the home, was already waiting for him. Her little office was furnished with two over-full shelves of books, like a study. ‘I came to Switzerland with nothing but a box of books,’ she liked to say, and did nothing to dispel the impression that she had voluntarily left much more valuable things behind in Germany to save her library. She was what Chanele would have called ‘a late girl’, in this case an academically late girl. She liked to slip into conversations the fact that she had sat at Heidegger’s feet as a philosophy student, and although her great master had later become a member of the Nazi Party and rector of ‘Führeruniversität Freiburg’, she continued to defend him. ‘Freiburg is the only university where books were never burned,’ she said, continuing to defend him in the face of all objections, taking from her shelf, as her definitive proof, what was probably her most precious possession, a personally signed copy of the Yearbook of Philosophy and Phenomonological Research from 1927, with the first part of the famous treatise on Being and Time.

  Fräulein Württemberger loved books significantly more than she did people, because people refused to fit into any rational system, instead rebelliously insisting on their own unclassifiable individuality. The fact that she had taken the job in the Wartheim at all she saw as a sacrifice of the kind that emigrants often have to make. In her introductory speech she had treated the well-meaning ladies from the Women’s Association with such polysyllabic contempt that they saw her as an experienced pedagogical expert and employed her on the spot.

  ‘I’d expected you earlier,’ she said by way of greeting. With a disparaging expression, as if the ritual of a handshake were far too intimate, she held out her fingertips. ‘Chewed nails,’ thought Arthur, as he did every time. ‘She wouldn’t let the children get away with that.’ Fräulein Württemberger withdrew her hand straight away, as one takes a fragile object from a clumsy child, and ran her hand in a nervous gesture over the severely tied bun on the back of her head. She was looking for unruly strands of hair like a prison warder for escaped prisoners.

  ‘There are four today.’ Fräulein Württemberger said it as reproachfully as if Arthur were personally responsible for this unfitting high state of illness among the children of the Women’s Association. As always, she hadn’t offered him a chair. Arthur doubted whether anyone had ever been allowed to sit in the precisely arranged visitor’s armchair in front of her desk, just as he sometimes suspected that the glasses in Fräulein Württemberger’s round spectacles were made of clear glass, and had the sole purpose of making the director of the children’s home seem even more intellectual than she did already.

  There was no separate consulting room in the home; even if there had been room for one, it wouldn’t have been wasted on the Women’s Association children. As long as the little patients were not bed-bound, they had to turn up in an orderly line – ‘No talking!’ – outside the ironing room on the second floor and wait for the doctor there. The big table, on which linen sheets and pillow-cases were usually laid, served as the examination couch, and if the children had to get undressed, their clothes ended up in a laundry basket. A whiff of soap-flakes hung in the air, and gave the place, otherwise so unsuited for consultations, a suggestion of antiseptic cleanliness.

  ‘Consultation’ was, however, a very euphemistic term for a process in which the children were not really consulted about anything at all. Fräulein Württemberger insisted on being present during every examination, and on answering Arthur’s questions herself.

  ‘He’s so clumsy,’ she complained about a little boy who had cut deep into the ball of his left thumb while peeling potatoes. ‘I’ve shown him ten times how to hold a knife, but he simply refuses to understand it.’

  The boy did not contradict her, and did not cry when the gaping wound was cleaned with iodine. Only when Arthur bent over to him as he stitched up the wound did he say timidly, ‘I’m left-handed.’

  ‘Is that why you cut yourself?’

 
; ‘When I use my right hand I can’t really . . .’

  He got no further than that. ‘There is one pretty little hand, and one ugly little hand,’ Fräulein Württemberger cut in. Martin Heidegger himself could not have delivered the axiom with greater conviction. ‘A pretty one and an ugly one. You must learn that, or you’ll never come to anything in life.’

  Arthur secretly winked at the little boy to say to him, ‘You don’t need to take things so seriously.’ But the little boy didn’t react to the gesture, he just said very politely, ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ and left the room.

  Arthur knew the second patient already. She had – ‘Because you always run, rather than walking like a sensible person!’ – broken her arm a few weeks previously, and Köbeli, the janitor of the Wartheim, who was slightly mentally handicapped but a skilled craftsman, had sawed open the plaster on Arthur’s telephoned instructions that morning. The fracture had healed without a hitch.

  ‘I hope you kept the plaster as a souvenir?’ asked Arthur. He remembered the other children immortalising themselves on it with signatures and little drawings.

  ‘We place great value on hygiene,’ Fräulein Württemberger, rather than the girl, replied. ‘We have of course thrown it away.’

  Next he was presented with a boy who had, in Arthur’s opinion, nothing at all wrong with him. He had just recently started wetting the bed – ‘At the age of eleven!’ – and although Fräulein Württemberger had done her pedagogical best to prevent such a thing – she made him wash the soiled sheet with his own hands every day, and as it dried on the line, he had to stand next to it while the other children laughed at him – even though she had done everything, therefore, that one might reasonably have expected of her, he simply wouldn’t stop. Fräulein Württemberger, who considered all psychology to be unscientific, insisted that the bad habit, regardless of fear or loneliness, must have a physiological reason, and repeated the formulation three times, as people do when they are proud to have understood a specialist term from a field alien to them. After a lengthy discussion, Arthur could do nothing more for the boy than prescribe him a weak sedative, even though he knew from his own experience that nightmares cannot be banished by sleeping pills.