‘That’s true,’ said Arthur, eager to know what secret he was about to be told. ‘It’s called medical confidentiality.’
‘Does it apply in Switzerland as well?’
‘It applies all over the world. If a patient tells me something, I’m never, ever allowed to tell anyone else. Unless the patient lets me.’
‘I won’t let you, though,’ said Irma and hopped triumphantly onto her tiptoes. ‘I’m your patient and I won’t let you.’ She performed a proper war dance, so proud was she over her cunning. ‘So you mustn’t tell Fräulein Württemberger that I’m not sick.’
‘I’ll have to think about that,’ said Arthur. ‘But it’s still your turn. Why are you so keen to suffer from something so serious?’
She had, it turned out, a very good reason.
‘Mama wrote to say that she still hasn’t found work, and that she’s now looking for a job abroad.’
Irma, the twelve-year-old adult, had translated that correctly: her mother saw no future in Germany, and had decided to emigrate.
‘And that it would make much more sense if Moses and I didn’t have to travel back and then leave again straight away.’
You can’t write to your children, ‘Don’t come home, you’re not safe here.’ You don’t explain to them, ‘My chances of a visa are better if you’re already out of the country.’ You write, ‘It would make more sense for you not to make the journey twice,’ and if a twelve-year-old is clever and listens when the grownups are talking about politics, she will understand what’s meant. Particularly when she’s promised her mother to take care of her little brother.
In the Wartheim, Mama had said, they were looked after well, and it would be best if they could stay there longer than the three months allowed by the rules. To get to Switzerland, Irma had needed a medical certificate. Why shouldn’t there be another one that prevented her from travelling home? For example, if she was coughing blood and incapable of travelling?
So, now she had told him, but he wasn’t allowed to say a word to Fräulein Württemberger. Because he was a doctor and Irma was his patient, and because he had sworn that oath that all doctors have to swear, and you’re not allowed to break an oath.
Arthur let his glasses dangle back and forth by one leg, as he often did when he was trying to think. His eyes had grown moist. Probably from the smell of soap.
‘What made you think of tuberculosis?’ he asked at last.
‘I read it in a book.’
‘A book about medicine?’
‘No,’ said Irma, ‘a novel.’
There was a library in the Wartheim, or at least a cupboard full of books, from which each child was allowed to borrow a book once a week. There were only a few children’s books, Nesthäkchen Flees the Nest, and The Turnach Children in Winter, and they were hard to get hold of. When you were choosing them, as with all things in the Wartheim, there was a strict order: first came the private children, whose parents were, after all, paying a lot of money, then the official children, and last of all the Women’s Association children who could pick through what was left. They were mostly adult books, battered volumes that had ended up in the Wartheim because charitable ladies had used a collection appeal to weed out their bookshelves. Irma had chosen the book because of its title: Alone Among Strangers. Perhaps, she had thought, it might be about a girl who can’t go home because bad things are happening there. But as it turned out it was a romantic tear-jerker, a maid’s novel, at the tragic end of which a spurned Juliet, estranged from her Romeo by a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, is coughing her way to the grave in a pulmonary sanatorium in Davos, until at the last moment her beloved turns up at her sick bed and inspires her to go on living. The endless protestations of love and outbreaks of emotion, all those adult complications, had only bored Irma, but the many descriptions of dark red stains on snow white handkerchiefs had given her an idea. In the novel everything had turned out well as soon as the heroine had started spitting blood.
Except that the author had neglected to specify that the blood had to be bright red. And mixed with sherbet powder.
The confession was over, and there was silence in the ironing room. There was only the sound of children squealing as they played outside, with no one telling them off.
‘And now?’ asked Arthur.
‘Can’t you just say that I really have tuberculosis?’
‘You mean I should lie?’
When Irma thought, her forehead wrinkled. ‘It wouldn’t really be a lie, she said. ‘They just wouldn’t have noticed.’
‘But then I would be a very bad doctor.’
Irma shrugged. It was a very grown-up gesture.
He hadn’t locked the door, so Fräulein Württemberger could simply come storming in dragging little Moses behind her. She thrust the boy at Irma and stood in front of Arthur with her arms propped on her hips. For the last half hour she had been in her office, outside in the courtyard and again in the office, and all that time she had been collecting arguments, as she might have collected quotations and evidence for a seminar dissertation, she had assembled all the things she wanted to say to this stuck-up Dr Meijer, and now it all came bubbling out of her, like water from a saucepan when steam lifts the lid.
She wanted to know exactly what was going on her here, right now, on the spot. She had no intention, not the slightest intention did she have, of simply being sent away and fobbed off, after all, she was the director of the home, and bore the responsibility, almost twenty children more than usual and most of them from Germany, and they couldn’t even pay for their expenses. And if an epidemic broke out now, who was going to take the blame? So what was going on?
Arthur was a man who was rather impressed by authorities and superiors, and if she had asked a little more politely, he would probably have told her the truth.
No, not even then. Even though he couldn’t have said when exactly he made his decision, he had switched entirely to Irma’s side.
‘On one point I can reassure you, Fräulein Württemberger,’ he said therefore. ‘The girl is not infectious.’
Irma lowered her head, and put an arm around her brother, ready to draw him comfortingly to her.
‘But she does have a serious, dangerous illness that requires a great deal of treatment.’
Irma raised her head again and looked at him. Big, brown, slightly squinting eyes. No one had ever looked at him so trustingly before.
‘Attentive and loving care,’ he repeated.
‘She can get that in Kassel. She’s going home next week.’
‘No,’ said Arthur. ‘She isn’t going. From a medical viewpoint I cannot allow that under any circumstances. The child is not capable of travelling. Far too dangerous.’
Once one has started lying, exaggeration isn’t difficult.
‘But the boy can’t travel on his . . .’
‘I couldn’t allow that either. Given the girl’s debilitated condition, such abrupt separation could lead to a shock.’
Now a stray tendril actually had escaped from the bun, and Fräulein Württemberger couldn’t stuff it back into place.
‘Of course,’ said Arthur, ‘of course I will issue the appropriate certificates, to be delivered to the relevant authorities.’
‘But what’s wrong with her?’ Fräulein Württemberger asked the question so loudly that her voice broke, and she tried to conceal the fact behind a cough.
‘It isn’t so simple to explain to a non-professional. Let me put it this way: I suspect a very rare and protracted pulmonary illness. Not infectious, as I say, but grave.’
Little Moses gripped his sister’s hand tightly. ‘Is Irma going to die?’ he asked in his little voice.
‘Of course not.’ Arthur comfortingly ran his hand over the boy’s short hair. ‘She will get better. Because she’ll be looked after very, very well here. Isn’t that right, Fräulein Württemberger?’
‘We are not a hospital. They need too many staff and—’
‘I have
no doubt,’ said Arthur, ‘that a woman of your famous diligence would find a solution even for this problem. A lot of care isn’t needed. Just particularly rich food. The child seems a little undernourished to me.’
Everyone in the Wartheim got enough to eat, Fräulein Württemberger snapped agitatedly, she wouldn’t hear such accusations, and in any case, who would cover the costs? But it was only a parting skirmish, and in her mind she was already formulating the letter in which she could complain to the Women’s Association about this Dr Meijer. Oh, she would find the right words all right.
‘And there is one other thing that I would urgently advise,’ said Arthur. ‘Give Irma a room of her own. Ideally with her brother. Because of the calming effect.’
Fräulein Württemberger hesitated and then decided at least to do of her own accord what she was in any case being forced to do. ‘I have been thinking the very same thing myself,’ she lied, and almost believed it herself. ‘We will get you well again, won’t we, little Irma?’ And she left the room as proudly as if she had just emerged triumphant from a difficult philosophical debate.
Irma shook his hand quite formally as he left, even gave a little curtsey, as one learned to do in Germany, and pressed her little brother’s head down in a proper bow. Arthur would have liked to hug her, had even spread his arms, and then lowered them again because it felt too officious. She looked at him as if she had guessed his thoughts, and said, ‘You’re a good doctor, Dr Meijer.’ And she suddenly winked and laughed, the first time he had heard her laugh, lifted her brother, who was almost as big as she was, and ran from the room with him.
On the way back to Zurich Arthur picked up a hitch-hiker who was standing at the side of the road with his thumb in the air. He was an old man, dressed in black, and when he sat down in the passenger seat he filled the beautiful new car with the smell of unaired cellars.
‘Bravo, Arthur,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘Now you’re proud of yourself. You’re slapping your own back and you think you’re terrific, yes.’
The road down towards the lowlands, it seemed to Arthur, had more bends in it than usual.
‘You’ve given a sick note to a girl who isn’t really sick,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘And of course that makes you a hero. You’ve defeated National Socialism, and the Swiss immigration authorities as well, yes.’
‘I can do no more than that,’ said Arthur.
‘Of course not. No one can.’ Uncle Melnitz coughed and spat blood into a big white handkerchief. ‘No one can ask more than that. Open their wallets when there’s a collection. Pull a serious face at protest meetings. Perhaps even write a letter to the papers. Signed bravely with your own name. Bravo, Arthur, yes.’
The steering wheel was hard to move today, and Arthur couldn’t take his eyes off the road for a moment.
‘It’s started like that every time,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘With everyone persuading themselves that there’s nothing more they can do, and that things aren’t going to get any worse. That it will stop of its own accord because it can’t go on like that.’
Both sides of the street were lined with strangers, who had to be carefully avoided.
‘But it does go on,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘It goes on like this every time.’
‘We’re living in the twentieth century.’
‘Of course that’s something else.’ Uncle Melnitz laughed and coughed and spat. ‘Something very, very different, yes. We live in the wonderful twentieth century. Not in the bad nineteenth or the wicked eighteenth or the terrible seventeenth.’
‘It’s not the same thing!’
The old man laughed so hard that little flecks of blood sprayed the windscreen. Bright red, foaming flecks of blood. Sherbet powder. ‘The present is always different. And never has it been as different as in the oh-so-wonderful twentieth century. When there is electric light. And aeroplanes. And radio. And only good people. Such things can’t happen again. Never, ever again, isn’t that right, Arthur?’
‘So what are we to do?’
‘You can’t ask me,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘I’m dead and buried.’
60
‘There must be a special word for it,’ thought Hillel. If you’re definitely not really friends with someone, but you aren’t really enemies with him either, because you’re far too indifferent about him, if you still somehow belong together, in the eyes of the others and, whether you like it or not, in your own as well – what would you call such a person? Mate? No, that smacked of grey shirts and army boots. Comrade? Böhni would have bridled at that one, it would have meant the Comintern and orders from Moscow. And he certainly wasn’t a chaver, as they said in Ivrit.
A colleague, well, fair enough, you could call it that. Although . . . You couldn’t really say that they were detached from one another, that they just happened to sit side by side at their desks. They had experienced that adventure together, down the steps with the box-cart and a team of horses. Which had, incidentally, not fulfilled its most important aim, because Malka Sofer had not been impressed in the slightest. On the contrary: she had called Hillel childish, and wanted nothing to do with him.
But it had been an adventure.
At first Böhni had distanced himself from the affair, Rosenthal had been driving, not he, but when he realised that the wild ride was admired as a heroic feat at the Strickhof, when he told the story he soon moved from ‘he’ and ‘that lunatic’ to ‘we’: ‘We gripped the reins, drove the horses on, took the bend.’ Except of course he didn’t mention that they had scattered a crowd of Fröntlers, either saying ‘we’ or ‘that other fellow’.
Because one can’t support such things, the teachers all pretended they hadn’t heard a thing about the forbidden excursion, but they became accustomed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, to bringing the two of them together on practical tasks, and putting them side by side in theoretical lessons. Which was more use to Böhni than it was to Hillel, because he was better able to copy from him.
The impulse behind this partnership – yes, that was perhaps a word that one could use, even it still wasn’t quite the right one – to some extent the initial spark had come from Headmaster Gerster. That Sunday evening, over the pitiful remains of his plum flan, he had reached the conclusion that in spite of the hefty bollocking he had given them the two sinners had got off far too lightly, and he had come up with an additional punishment for them, which he announced to them the following day. They were to write an essay – ‘Yes, both of you together, so that you learn that you can work through cooperation, and not opposition!’ – which was to be delivered the following Monday, eight pages in their best handwriting. As a pedagogically instructive subject he had chosen, ‘The meaning of a healthy farming class for our nation’.
Of course that was a red rag to a bull. Böhni wasn’t much good at writing, but on the other hand he couldn’t just let Rosenthal do it. Even if it would have been easy for him, given that Jews, as everyone knew, preferred to work with their heads rather than their hands. At any rate, he tried it on his own, and fiddled around with it until Wednesday, but only managed to get two pages together, and they didn’t make sense at all. Then, when he asked Rosenthal, quite casually and in passing, how far he had got, Hillel just grinned and said he wasn’t planning on making his life difficult if there was an easy way of doing things. He had found a brochure on this very subject, and they could just copy out its introduction, Gerstli would never notice. But he liked to leave such hard work to Böhni – after all, he was supposed to do something as well, because how had Gerster put it so well? They were to work through cooperation, not through opposition.
Böhni furiously refused, these were Jewish tricks, and he wouldn’t have anything to do with them. But by Friday he hadn’t got any further, and on Sunday he wanted he wanted to go to the international in the Hardturm, Germany versus Switzerland. So in the end – ‘But you take responsibility!’ – he had to accept the suggestion and set about copying. But the brochure, and this was one of
Rosenthal’s typical tricks, wasn’t a nice Swiss pamphlet from the school library, as Böhni had expected, but a Zionist treatise with one of those Jewish candelabras on the title page. But the text, one had to admit, wasn’t at all bad. The author wrote that a state can only remain healthy if its citizens farm the soil with their own hands, that the sciences still have their significance, but that only agriculture can strengthen a people’s soul. In principle these were all thoughts to which Böhni could not have objected, but he wasn’t happy with where they came from. Besides, when copying it out he had to be as careful as a hawk to see that he always wrote ‘the Swiss’ rather than ‘the Jews’, and ‘the Confederacy’ rather than the ‘Yishuv’. Once he made a mistake and had to start a whole page over from the beginning.
Gerster didn’t notice a thing. He was even very impressed by their observations, and praised them both for their genuinely patriotic way of thinking. Afterwards Böhni could never tell anyone how Rosenthal had bamboozled him. It was another secret between them, which bound them together somewhere between enmity and friendship.
There must be a special word for it.
It was also a part of their special relationship that they squabbled at every opportunity. When, for example. Germany had won the international one nil, the next day Rosenthal asked pointedly who Böhni had really been cheering for, the Swiss or his beloved Germans with the swastikas on their shirts. Böhni replied that he should stay out of it, football was a thing that his people knew absolutely nothing about. Whereupon Rosenthal actually claimed that a totally Jewish team, Hakoah Vienna, had won the Austrian championship a few years before. You could never tell whether he was taking the piss out of you or not.
In turn, Böhni felt superior in practical subjects, and where that superiority was not obvious, one could help it along a little with some little tricks. For example there was a method of making a cow so crazy (by sticking pepper up its arse) that it could barely be milked, and then when it knocked the pail over for the third time, you could say, ‘Oh, yes, these city people, who think milk comes from the milkman.’ At the next opportunity, Rosenthal swung the pitchfork so vigorously that Böhni got a load right in the face, whereupon Hillel apologised very politely, because as an inexperienced city boy he had mistaken a pitchfork for a flail.
Melnitz Page 65
