Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘I want to tell you a story,’ said the old man. They had never seen him so full of life. ‘I’m sure you want to know where I got my name.’

  They didn’t want to know. Actually they didn’t want to know anything about him at all. But when Uncle Melnitz wanted to tell a story, he did so.

  ‘Sixteen hundred and forty-eight,’ he said. He let the syllables melt away on his tongue. ‘A wonderful year. The Thirty Years’ War was coming to an end, and there was peace all across Europe. Although not for the Jews. Perhaps because we calculate time differently. For us it wasn’t 1648, it was 5408. 5409. Terrible years.’

  ‘We don’t want to hear your old stories,’ said François. He tried to stand up, but Uncle Melnitz pressed him effortlessly back down onto his seat. The more often he died, the stronger he became.

  ‘You’ll like this story,’ he said. ‘You most of all, Shmul. There are Jews in it who have themselves baptised.’

  Uncle Melnitz hadn’t been so young for ages.

  ‘It was in the Ukraine,’ he said, ‘which wasn’t yet called the Ukraine. Countries change their names. They also change their friends. Only their enemies always stay the same. We always stay the same, yes.

  ‘The story I want to tell you is about Bohdan Khmelnitsky. Do you know the name? Of course you do. For our sins God punished us Jews with a good memory. If someone has done something particularly bad to us, we say, “May his name be erased.” And then we remember it for all eternity.’ Uncle Melnitz laughed. He threw his laughter onto the table, a hand full of sharp-edged pebbles.

  ‘Bohdan Khmelnitsky, yes. He wanted to wage a war with his Cossacks against the Polish magnates who ruled the Ukraine, and because it was such a long way to Poland he first took it out on the Jews. It’s an old game. The crusaders played it in their day too. Jerusalem was so far away, and the Jews were so close at hand. Khmelnitsky never got to Warsaw. He only got as far as Pereiaslav. Pyriatyn. Lokhvytsya.’

  ‘You’re dead,’ said Hinda. ‘You don’t exist any more.’

  ‘Good!’ said Uncle Melnitz, and drew out the vowel as if he were praising a child. ‘Goooood! You’ve worked it out. None of them exist any more. They’re all dead. In Pohrebyshche. In Zhivotov. In Nemyriv. In Tulchyn. In Polonne.’

  ‘I don’t even know where those places are!’ Arthur heard himself shouting, even though he hadn’t shouted at all.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘That’s why I’m telling you about them. So that you remember when it starts up again there. In Sasov. In Ostroh. In Kostyantyniv. In Bar.’

  Hinda threw her hands over her face, as she had done when Zalman’s train set off from the station for Galicia and disappeared among the winding tracks. ‘Please, please, please . . .’

  ‘Pleading doesn’t help,’ said Melnitz, and threw the next handful of pebbles on the table. ‘It never helped. Not in Kremenetz. Not in Chernigov. Not in Starodub. Not in Narol.’

  ‘Please . . .’

  ‘Not in Tomaszow. Not in Sczebreczin. Not in Hrubieszow. Not in Bilgoraj. Not in Homiel.’

  ‘That no longer has anything to do with us.’

  ‘Of course not,’ replied Uncle Melnitz. ‘Nothing at all. It’s all such a long time ago. People today are so much more intelligent than they were in those days. Do you know what the idiots in the Ukraine called their times? The birth pangs of the Messiah. Because they thought Salvation would have to come after so much suffering. But the birth was a long time coming. It must have been a phantom pregnancy.’ He gave a bleating laugh and, without standing up – ei! ei! ei! – did a little dance.

  ‘They were funny people, Bohdan Khmelnitsky and his haidamaks. People with imagination. When they tied a belt around a woman’s neck and dragged her behind their horses by it, they called it: giving her a red ribbon. Isn’t that ingenious? When they cut someone’s throat they called it: playing shechita. Come on, that’s a good one! When they cut open a pregnant woman’s belly and sewed in a living cat . . .’

  ‘That was then,’ said Hinda quickly.

  ‘In the Dark Ages,’ said Arthur.

  ‘They don’t have things like that any more,’ said François.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. I’m a stupid old man, and besides, I’m dead. Today none of those things would be possible. The animal protection society would intervene and protect the cat.’

  The gravel rattled on the table and sprayed away in all directions.

  ‘Even in those days they weren’t always so imaginative,’ said Uncle Melnitz. ‘At least they were only doing their duty. What would become of the world if people didn’t carry out orders as they were given? In Homiel, for example, there were no acts of cruelty. Everything went its orderly way, yes. There was a wooden synagogue there, but they didn’t drive the Jews into it to barricade the doors and set it on fire. Even though synagogues burn so well. Because of all the books.

  ‘No, Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks were too sensible for that. A synagogue is a building, and you can always use buildings again. As a stable. As a granary.

  ‘If it had been possible to take them all away, the Jews themselves could have been sold. The Turks paid per head and claimed their investments back as ransom from the communities in Italy and Holland. But the Cossacks had no carts to hand.

  ‘They weren’t cruel people, but they had their orders. When they sat around their fires in the evening, they sang beautiful songs, with dark, soughing basses, but they had their orders. When they drank vodka, they became sentimental and melancholy, and the tears ran into their beards. But they had their orders.

  ‘They had the whole village line up. In rank and file. The men, the women, the old, the young. The children too. They had to take off their clothes, because they could be used again. If you want to win a war, you can’t waste a thing.

  ‘The old rabbi stood there, his skin as thin and grey as if it had been made of yellowing tomes. The young girl for whose hand two men were fighting; she secretly loved a third, who was now standing there too, quite close to her and yet too far away for her to take his hand. Two men who had scrambled all their lives for honours and dignities. Now each would have yielded to the other, but they were no longer asked. The village idiot stood there, the one who had always laughed when carrying water and chopping wood, and who was now afraid, because everyone had such serious faces and he didn’t know if it was his fault. The beautiful woman stood next to the ugly one; for the first time they were naked, and could have compared one another. But there was no longer any difference between them; they were dead, even though they were still alive. The fat man stood next to the thin, the rich next to the poor, the one with all the plans next to the hopeless one, and between even them there was no longer any difference.

  ‘The Cossacks did their work as they had been instructed to, without cruelty or ill will. They had a row step forward, their sabres struck, the next row stepped forward, the one behind that and so on and so on. Last of all they killed old Bathsheba, who had lost five children and therefore become a midwife. She had brought every other person in the village into the world, and now she had to watch as they were driven from it again.

  ‘That was how it was in Homiel, during the birth pangs of the Messiah, yes. Nothing of the kind could happen today. We’re living in the twentieth century, and no one uses sabres any more.’

  The air was warm, and even though it hadn’t yet struck seven, you could already tell that it was going to be a hot day. The birds were waking up in the chestnut tree above their heads, and the stones around them were not gravestones, but the bases for benches and tables, so that you could sit down, order a beer and enjoy your day.

  ‘You’re not asking me,’ said Melnitz. ‘I haven’t even told you how I got my name.’

  They didn’t ask, and he told them anyway.

  ‘The prettiest girls,’ said Melnitz. ‘The Cossacks didn’t kill them. They dragged them inside the church and had them baptised, they made them their wives and impregnated them with their c
hildren.

  ‘When the horror had passed – it always passes, and it is always too late – when Khmelnitsky was defeated and everyone despised him, even those who had admired him – especially those who had admired him, that’s always how it is – when they wrote the special prayers in which Khmelnitsky would be remembered for all time – may his name be erased! – they called a great va’ad in Lublin, a synod of all the scholars who had survived the bad times. Only a few came, and they had a lot to discuss and to decide. It isn’t easy to recreate a normal, everyday life, when for a few years nothing was everyday or normal.

  ‘And now,’ said Melnitz, ‘now I have something that will make you laugh. They also made a decision because of all the women who had been baptised, or who had given birth to Cossack children even without baptism. It was decided that they were to be brought back into the community of Israel. Every soul was needed, because many had not remained alive during those years, when the rest of Europe was enjoying its new-found peace. They were to belong to the community again, it was decided, they and their children.

  ‘What they didn’t decide, and what happened anyway: these children, whose fathers were unknown, were given a nickname. They were called Khmelnitskys. Because they owed their existence to the wicked enemy.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Uncle Melnitz, and bleated his gravelly laugh, ‘perhaps we Jews only continue to exist because we have so many enemies. They ensure that we don’t forget who we are, yes.

  ‘Khmelnitsky is my name,’ he said. ‘Melnitz. A name that cannot be erased.’

  When they got back to the old people’s home, Chanele was awake again and even recognised them. At least she smiled and said, ‘Nice of you to come.’ With Frau Olchev’s help she had put on her black dress with the white edging and sat very straight in her armchair.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring your children, Arthur?’ she asked.

  68

  They missed everything. The solemnities, the debates, the brawling. Simply everything.

  The Zionist Congress was taking place, for once and at last in his own city, and Hillel wasn’t there. Chaim Weizmann, whose picture he had hung on his locker, walked each day to the meetings in the Stadttheater, and Hillel didn’t get to see him. The scholar Nachum Goldman had travelled in specially from Honduras, where he had lived in exile since being expatriated from Germany, and Hillel couldn’t ask him for an autograph. David Ben-Gurion was there, the union leader, and many others whose names one only ever read in the newspapers. They were all there, all of them. But not Hillel, even though he had been chosen to go on guard duty for Shomer Hatzair, even though he could have stood outside the front of the theatre in his blue shirt, his arms propped on his hips and his alert gaze staring into the distance, like one of the guards of the Hula Valley in a photograph.

  Böhni fared no better. Not that he would have been interested in the Congress, of course not, but something was going on in the street. Demonstrations were being organised and flyers distributed against the invasion of straggly beards, against these foreign-looking figures who tried to haggle over the price of the ticket in the tram and didn’t even know that you were supposed to leave a tip in the café. They acted as if the city belonged to them, they were pushy and noisy, and they couldn’t even speak proper German. No wonder there were arguments, but Böhni wasn’t there, he could only read the appeals in the Front not to let Zurich become Zurisalem, or Bahnhofstrasse Zionsallee.

  And the worst thing was: they had to put up with each other, twenty-three hours a day, or even twenty-four if you added an hour’s yard exercise. They stayed together there as well, and stood apart from the others, because the others were all real criminals, and they had a healthy respect for them.

  The judge had given them short shrift: brawling under Article 133, three hundred franc fine for each of them, or thirty days detention, that’s that. An example had to be set, he had roared, in Switzerland they didn’t pursue political arguments with street fights and skirmishes, and if anyone couldn’t see that then they needed to be taught a lesson until they did. He didn’t care who had started it, who had provoked whom, and the law wisely didn’t care either. ‘Anyone involved in a brawl . . .’ was all it said, neither of the accused had disputed their involvement, and political convictions were not mitigating circumstances. The legislator, and in the end that was the people, didn’t care in the least whether they were reds, blacks, browns or as far as he was concerned grass-greens or lemon-yellows, these fellows who tore into each other with their fists, brawling was forbidden either way, and involvement was punished by prison or a fine.

  Böhni, Walter, and Rosenthal, Heinrich: three hundred francs, pay up or do your time, next case, please.

  Three hundred francs was a fortune for an agricultural student. Böhni didn’t even have to think about asking his parents, in Flaach they’d never seen as much money as that all at once, and even if they’d had it, it certainly wasn’t going to a son who brought shame on their heads, for a lad with previous convictions at whom everyone in the village was already pointing a finger. Böhni’s parents hadn’t been in the courtroom, at harvest time they had, God knew, better things to be getting on with, when they were in any case missing a few hands they had firmly expected to be working for them, now that the Strickhof was on holiday.

  Hillel’s father had sat there throughout, with such a wounded expression on his face that one might have thought the whole punch-up had taken place solely to defy him. He had always been opposed to Hillel’s Zionism, and now one could see where it led when an adolescent burrowed his way into an ideology and didn’t listen to his father or, which in Adolf Rosenthal’s opinion amounted to the same thing, to reason. Bad company and fighting. A Jewish boy thumping people in public – it only caused rish’es. Hillel knew that his father, if he had asked him subserviently enough, would have would have been able to drum up the three hundred francs one way or another, with interest in the form of contrition and obedience. But he didn’t even think of paying such a price. He would rather be locked up. And Adolf Rosenthal remained stubborn as well, however much Lea might complain. No help without an admission of guilt. If you won’t listen, you go to jail.

  ‘Not a bad daily wage,’ Hillel said to Böhni while they were still in the courtroom. ‘Ten francs a day, seven times a week. Some workers don’t earn half that.’

  What he hadn’t reckoned with, and neither had Böhni, was that the governor of the local prison was a person with a sense of humour, and had thus come up with the idea of locking the two of them up together in a cell. ‘Then you will have plenty of time for your philosophical discussions,’ he said. ‘And If you want to beat the living daylights out of each other, that’s up to you. But no bloodstains on the blankets.’

  Twenty-three hours a day. Twenty-four with yard exercise. In a cell, for which a room in the Strickhof was a luxury hotel in comparison.

  There was one stool. One of them always had to lie on his mattress or sit on the edge of the bunk, either on top, where your feet dangled into the void, or on the bottom, where you had to bend your back. Right at the start, when he still refused to grasp that they were real prisoners, Hillel had asked for a second stool. The guard said only that his Majesty should be so kind as to go and sit on the throne, meaning the toilet bowl. And he laughed at his own joke as if he had made it for the first time.

  They weren’t assigned to work. It wasn’t worth training them for four weeks. But they were given prison clothes, a brown suit not much different from the ones they wore to work in the Strickhof stables.

  The worst thing was the boredom. They were woken at half past five, to which they were accustomed from school, there was breakfast at six, the daily ration of bread, a glob of jam and coffee so thin that even when the metal cup was full one could still make out the Zurich crest stamped on the bottom. The cleanliness of the cell was checked at eight, and having been drilled by Kudi Lampertz they never had any problems with that.

  And then: nothing else.


  Apart from yard exercise, nothing at all, for the whole day.

  Books were only allowed from the second month. At first only one newspaper each, which meant that their only intellectual stimulation was the Front and the Volksrecht. At first each refused to read the other’s newspaper, and they just made jokes about it: it was nice of Böhni to have fresh toilet paper sent in every day, or: Rosenthal wasn’t to forget to wash his hands after reading, the Volksrecht was so red that the colour was bound to come off.

  But soon the boredom was stronger than their convictions. Böhni in particular was bad at being locked in, he was a person who had to be on the move, and he could drive Hillel round the bend by marching back and forth, the few paces from one wall to the other, or doing sit-ups on the floor out of a surplus of energy. You had to distract yourself somehow, and so it was that Hillel studied the Front from cover to cover for the first time in his life, from the leading article entitled ‘Oy veh!’ to the advertisements, in which the Kreuel restaurant at 33 Kanonengasse recommended itself to its kind customers with Hürlimann beer.

  Böhni read the Volksrecht, where in the reports from Spain he failed to recognise the civil war as he understood it, and in all seriousness believed at first that there was two wars going on down there, the just struggle of a nation under the yoke of Communism against its oppressors, and the terror bombing of squadrons of foreign planes against Basque towns. Even where the politics of the city was concerned, the Volksrecht seemed to inhabit a different world from his own; here they supported the red majority on the council, even though everyone knew that the comrades were hand in glove with international Jewry and . . .

  ‘You’re a dickhead,’ said Hillel.

  ‘No one can dispute that the Jews . . .’

  ‘Give me an example.’

  ‘There are hundreds!’

  ‘Give me one!’

  ‘Erm . . .’ said Böhni.

  ‘Aha!’ said Hillel.