So far everything had gone well for Hillel, and in fact he had already won the bet. The longer Böhni sat next to him without announcing him as the arch-enemy who had crept in secretly, the safer he felt. One had to acknowledge that. Böhni played fair.
But then things went wrong.
The people were already getting up and starting to talk to each other, while an official reminded them from the lectern to turn up at the following weekend’s propaganda march. Then suddenly two of their fellow pupils made their way across the hall to Hillel and Böhni. They had witnessed the bet in the dormitory, and now come to observe its outcome on the spot.
‘Well, Böhni,’ thundered one of them from a distance, ‘we’ll be watching you brushing shoes from tomorrow.’
‘And cleaning the shithouse,’ laughed the other.
‘Shh!’ said Böhni.
‘Didn’t think Rosenthal had it in him, did you?’
‘Shh!’
‘But respect where it’s due,’ said the first boy, as loudly as if he was summoning the cattle in the meadow. He slapped Hillel appreciatively on the shoulder. ‘That’s quite some achievement, coming here as a Jew.’
And that was it. The people had been bored all evening, and now at last they had the opportunity to do politics the way they liked to, with their fists. Particularly the men from the Harst, for whom a meeting without a brawl was an evening wasted, really came to life.
Böhni saw a circle of people coming towards them, grabbed Hillel by the hand and cried, ‘Come on, let’s get out of here!’
They made it to the door, and that was their great good fortune, because the anteroom was too narrow for a proper free-for-all. Their two fellow pupils fought with them, because even if they didn’t particularly like Rosenthal, he was in their class, and when it came to fighting the principle was, ‘One for all and all for one.’
The Fröntlers came at them from all sides. Hillel didn’t even have time to wonder why Böhni was suddenly standing shoulder to shoulder with him and defending him. They found each other very disagreeable, after all, and friends, no, they certainly weren’t friends.
It wasn’t a long scrap. The policemen who were getting mightily bored outside on the terrace in front of their beer glasses, from which they still weren’t allowed to drink, were relieved when they were finally able to grab their truncheons and let rip. If nothing at all happened, there were no laurels to be earned on Front patrol. They came thundering into the anteroom and discharged their duties.
Soon the two sides had been driven apart, and the landlord’s damages claim had been recorded.
Of the participants in the scuffle, only two people had not stopped in time and were arrested. One had a bloody nose and the other was starting to get a black eye.
‘Name?’
‘Böhni, Walter.’
‘And you?’
‘Rosenthal, Hillel.’
‘Hillel? How do you spell that?’
‘His name’s actually Heinrich,’ said Böhni.
‘My name is Hillel. It’s a good Jewish first name.’
‘A Jew? Great,’ said the constable.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It means we’ve got one of each. Our commander’s been saying for ages, “That’s the only way we can make an example, so that there’s peace in this city at long last.”’
‘But we weren’t fighting with each other.’ It isn’t easy to argue when you have to press a bloody handkerchief to your sore nose at the same time.
‘Then you can tell that to the judge,’ said the policeman. ‘Except it won’t interest him. Who against whom – it’s completely irrelevant. Paragraph 133. Disturbance of the peace. You’re liable for prosecution just by being there.’
‘But that’s not fair!’
‘You should have thought of that before,’ said the policeman. ‘Take them away!’
He was in a hurry. Once you’ve finished the day’s work, no one can stop you having a beer.
65
Herr Grün’s illness dragged on. The fever had subsided, certainly, and his lungs sounded quite normal again, but he just couldn’t get back on his feet. Arthur said he had noticed such things in other patients, but most of them had been much older people. Rachel would have to imagine it as something like a flood, where someone would cling on to something with the last of their strength and keep themselves above water. If he lost his strength and let go, it would be hard for him to grab hold of anything else.
That might certainly be the case, Rachel said, although she would have preferred the doctor to have given her an effective remedy rather than fine words. But be that as it may, she was a busy woman and didn’t have time to play the Samaritan all the time. She was responsible for fifteen members of staff, and you hadn’t time to hold hands with each individual.
On the other hand . . .
When Herr Grün lay in bed under his bedcover like that – a new bedcover, of course, with real down, she’d made sure of that – when he just lay there like that, above all when he had just woken up and hadn’t yet had time to put the old grumpy mask back on, he had a quite different face. His smile, if he had such a thing, he still kept in the basement, but to remain with the image, the door was already open a crack.
And besides . . .
No, that wasn’t it. The fact that Frau Posmanik always greeted her as submissively as if the next person after a daughter of Herr Kamionker the factory director would be the Prophet Elijah, followed by the moshiach in person, had nothing whatever to do with it. She didn’t care for flattery. Not she. A professional woman has no time for such shmontses. And Frau Posmanik had only been after leftover swatches of brocade. No, that was certainly not why she went all the way to Molkenstrasse.
But . . .
She was interested in Herr Grün, she didn’t dispute that. She really knew her way around people, Oh yes, she had had her experiences, and they hadn’t always been the most pleasant, but she didn’t understand this man. There were a number of things about him that just didn’t fit together, a suit that he’d begged from various different places, trousers here, jacket there.
If she wanted to make conversation with him, as one should when visiting a patient, he wouldn’t open his mouth, you had to drag the words out of him one by one. But then when little Aaron came into the room – he visited the lodgers several times a day, in spite of Rachel’s strict reminder that Herr Grün had to get better and needed peace and quiet – when he knocked at the door, twice slowly and three times quickly, nobody knew what that was supposed to mean, the patient sat up on his pillows, even though that had taken a lot out of him at first, and started entertaining the boy. Yes, entertaining him. You might have thought the bed was a stage and Aaron had bought a ticket. Herr Grün had all kinds of silly poems and song lyrics that no sane person would ever have learned by heart. Aaron couldn’t understand most of it, he was far too young, but he listened to it all with a beaming face and sometimes actually squealed with pleasure. Then his younger siblings poked their heads into the room and wanted to join in the fun. But Aaron sent them out with a severe expression. ‘Uncle Grün has to get better, and needs peace and quiet.’
Even the oranges that Rachel brought, Herr Grün shared with the boy. And they cost a fortune, now that it was summer, and Rachel had had to pay for them out of her own purse when there wasn’t enough in petty cash at the shop. Not that she would have said as much to Herr Grün, heaven knows what he would have thought.
But he could have said thank you.
‘Do you actually have to be a child to be treated decently by you?’ she once asked, whereupon Herr Grün nodded very seriously and replied, ‘It would be an advantage.’
No, Rachel really didn’t have time to make patient visits every day, certainly not if it wasn’t appreciated. Luckily there were other people for this kind of thing, people who weren’t as tired as she was in the evening, who could shut their grocery shop at seven on the dot, and who had never heard of last minute commi
ssions and overtime. Generally speaking, when a person is always alone and has no real family, it’s practically a mitzvah to do find something sensible for him to do.
Désirée took on the task without asking too many questions. She didn’t just attend to the patient, but looked after the Posmanik family as well. On her visits she always brought a box of groceries and wouldn’t even let anyone thank her for it. She was happy if anyone would take it off her hands, she claimed, in her field it was hard to judge precisely how much she needed, and if you’d bought too much then it was better for it to be eaten than to go off. She found a job for Herr Posmanik in the warehouse of a pasta factory, and even made sure that his wife dropped by every week and collected his pay packet in person.
‘She’s an angel,’ said Frau Posmanik to Rachel, who replied, ‘Well, if she has time on her hands.’
When she paid her visits Désirée didn’t just sit by Herr Grün’s bed and wait for him to chat to her; she preferred to make herself useful. One day, when she was cleaning the window so that the bit of sunlight that wandered into the courtyard at the back could also find its way into the room, he suddenly said, ‘You were very fond of him.’
‘Of whom?’
‘The person you lost.’
‘How do . . .?’
‘It’s obvious,’ said Herr Grün.
Désirée rubbed away at a piece of putty that was stuck to the glass and just wouldn’t go away. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was very fond of him.’
It was so quiet in the room that the drill sergeant could be heard issuing orders in the parade ground.
‘I once had someone like that,’ Herr Grün said after a pause. ‘My best friend. His name was Blau. Not really, of course. That would have been too much of a coincidence. But it looked good on the posters.’
Désirée didn’t turn around and went on cleaning. In the years of her solitude she had become just as good a listener as Mina had once been.
‘His real name was Schlesinger,’ the voice behind her said. ‘Siegfried Schlesinger. But because everyone called me Grün, we had the idea that he should be Blau. Grün and Blau. That was our act.’
Herr Grün – whose name wasn’t Grünberg, Grünfeld or Grünbaum, but really Grün – had appeared in cabaret, never in the really big Berlin venues like the Chat Noir or the Kadeko, but always in Friday theatres, so-called because the artistes received their wages once a week and not every morning after the performance as they were in the small clubs. His speciality had been the double act, with his partner Schlesinger, who called himself Blau because it looked better on the posters.
Grün and Blau.
‘We even made a record,’ said Herr Grün, ‘and sold it at the interval. We were always on before the interval, never in the second part like the famous acts. No one would have stayed there and ordered another round of sekt. Although we were good. You’ll laugh,’ said Herr Grün, ‘but people once laughed at me.’
‘Guten Tag, Herr Grün.’
‘Guten Tag, Herr Blau.’
That was how their act always began, it had been a real trademark. Sometimes they came on in coats and hats and were passersby in the street, sometimes they were holding cups and were customers in a café, but the first sentences were always the same, and eventually the time came when the audience laughed even after their greeting, sometimes even applauded, even though no one had said anything funny. That was popularity.
‘Guten Tag, Herr Grün.’
‘Guten Tag, Herr Blau.’
He imitated both voices, exaggerated the rumbling bass of his own and the shrill descant of his partner’s.
‘You shouldn’t strain yourself,’ said Désirée.
‘No, I should. It does me good.’
Blue was small and thin, a straight line in the landscape, and Herr Grün had been fat in those days. Yes, really. ‘I filled my suit well, and never skimped on the butter sauce. It was a professional belly, my most important prop.’
Grün had been the authority figure, the man who knew everything and could explain everything. Blau was the nebbish who didn’t understand a thing and only ever asked stupid questions. ‘When in fact it was exactly the other way round. Schlesinger sat in the wardrobe reading books, while I romped with the twirlies. The chorus girls,’ he added by way of explanation.
‘I’d translated that for myself.’ Désirée was now sitting on the chair beside the bed, but was still holding the cleaning rag, as if to say, ‘Just for a moment.’
‘Hello, Herr Blau.’
When Herr Grün imitated himself, he spoke ‘jargon’, the linguistic bastard that the Germans mistake for Yiddish. That had been their role: two cliché Jews who make the simplest things unnecessarily complicated and thus come to surprising conclusions.
‘We weren’t the only ones in Berlin with that shtick. Other people had noticed that all you had to do was get up on stage and say “mishpocha” and people would start laughing. But we were the best.’
Herr Grün closed his eyes as if talking for such an unusually long time had exhausted him, but he was only trying to block out a painful image. ‘They’re still laughing,’ he said. ‘But it isn’t funny any more.’
The dialogue about the apples, that had been their biggest hit, in the years before 1933. They talked about the red ones, which always thought they were ripe at last, and hadn’t noticed that they were already starting to turn brown. About the brown ones, which you had to get rid of quickly because otherwise they infected all the other ones. And then, when Hitler was Reich Chancellor, they’d invented the punchline about the Reich apple that everyone had to bite into, but you couldn’t eat it, it was so disgusting.
‘When people stopped laughing at it, we should have got out straight away,’ said Herr Grün. ‘But we were actors. So we thought it was our fault.’
And then . . .
They were interrupted. Little Aaron knocked at the door, twice slowly, three times quickly, as Herr Grün had taught him. They were secret agents, Herr Grün and he, and they need signals like that.
‘Not now,’ said Désirée, but Herr Grün smiled – he actually smiled, suddenly he remembered how it was done – and said, ‘Let him.’
‘Do you know a new poem, Uncle Grün?’
‘I know a million billion poems,’ said Herr Grün.
‘But today I’ve got something much better for you. A magic spell, it goes like this: “Owa, Tanah, Siam.”’
The little boy waited and then, when nothing came next, looked at his idol as disappointedly as if Herr Grün had promised him a wonderful sweet and then held out nothing but empty silver paper. ‘And?’
‘It’s a magic spell. You have to say it five times in a row, as quickly as you can, and then you’ll see.’
Aaron looked slightly dubious, but Herr Grün had never disappointed him, so he started practising talking really quickly. ‘Owa Tanah Siam, Owa Tanah Siam . . .’ When he worked out what a wonderfully rude sentence lay hidden behind it, he beamed as radiantly as if it were his birthday.
‘But whatever you do, don’t try the trick out on your brother and sister!’
‘Of course not,’ said Aaron, and ran out to try it on his brother and sister straight away. And all the other children in the house.
‘Now we’ve got some peace,’ said Herr Grün, and sat up straight in his bed for the first time in ages.
‘You’re very different from what one might expect.’
Herr Grün shook his head. ‘No, Fräulein Pomeranz,’ he said. ‘I’ve just learned not to let everyone see past my face.’
He didn’t want to chat, that much was clear, he wanted to tell a story. About how it had been, and how it had stopped.
At first everything seemed to be going on as before. They mightn’t have belonged to the Reich Culture Chamber, but they were allowed to go on performing. In cabaret people didn’t seem to take it all too seriously. They were used to Nazis disrupting the performance with catcalls. It was part of their job, and was no worse than the dr
unks who thought, after the second bottle of wine, that they were funnier than the people on stage. After Hitler came to power it wasn’t very different. Perhaps you were less direct in your phrasing, perhaps you were a bit more discreet with your barbs, but people listened much more precisely and reacted to nuances. ‘A dictatorship does wonders for your sense of hearing,’ said Herr Grün.
And then, in 1934, two men were waiting for them after the show. They were standing quite patiently by the stage door. As if they wanted an autograph. ‘In those days they didn’t yet have the leather coats they wear now, each of them just had an armband, and they still looked slightly uncertain, two comedians who aren’t sure about the lines in their new sketch. They hadn’t rehearsed it yet. One of them hit me in the face, but his heart wasn’t in it. I’ve learned to tell the difference in the meantime. Amateurs.’
And then . . .
But Herr Grün had overtaxed himself, a convalescent who wants to cross the whole city the first time he goes for a walk, and doesn’t yet have the strength for it. ‘I need to sleep a bit now,’ he said.
Perhaps Désirée was just imagining it, but when she looked quickly in on him before she left she thought his face had a bit more colour than usual.
She told Rachel about it, and Rachel was strangely insulted. ‘Sorry if people don’t trust me. I don’t force myself on anyone. I’m a busy woman.’
Melnitz Page 71
