But then Böhni did come up with an irrefutable argument. ‘The department stores,’ he said. ‘They’re finishing off the small businesses. Epa, for example. Or Jelmoli.’
‘They’re Italians.’
‘If you fall for their names! Meier, for example, with his department store, his name isn’t even Meier. He writes his name up on all the shop windows and it isn’t even his name. But we’ve . . . they’ve carried out a few improvements on that. Did you know he’s a Jew?’
Hillel thought of his baptised Uncle François and nodded. ‘Yes, I knew that.’
‘There you have it!’ said Böhni.
And so it went on all day. Neither of them convinced the other, no one could have expected that, but the hours passed.
Not that they talked about politics all the time. Their most frequent subject was the Strickhof, and how headmaster Gerster would react to their sentence. There was something in the school regulations about ‘blameless students’. It could be interpreted in various different ways, but that they were now blameful – was there even such a word – there could be no doubt, and if Gerstli went stubborn on them, they would be flying out of the school in a high arc.
A disaster.
Böhni, normally a fellow of few words, couldn’t stop telling Hillel about the grave consequences that such an expulsion would have for him personally. He would have to creep home like someone who had wanted to make something better of himself and had failed in his task; the rich farmers’ sons would laugh at him and the girls in the village wouldn’t so much as look at him. And his parents . . . Böhni knew very well what his time at school meant for them: two years with one pair of hands too few on the farm, and no money to take on a labourer.
Hillel also thought out loud about how his parents would react. His father would point out that he had been right – ‘What business did you have at an agricultural college? That’s goyim naches,’ he had always said – and Adolf Rosenthal wasn’t the kind of person who would ever forget such a defeat. He would rub Hillel’s nose in the story at every opportunity, and Hillel wouldn’t have a single argument to silence him. But worst of all – except he didn’t tell Böhni this – Hillel was worried about what Malka Sofer would say. And he had only ever talked to her properly on one occasion. Then she had described him as childish over his adventure with the box-cart, but had still acknowledged that he was going to an agricultural college so that he could later be a useful member of society in a Jewish state. If he was expelled now . . .
Later it turned out that this worry at least had been superfluous. Malka had received her permit for Palestine and had left without saying goodbye.
‘Maybe we should write Gerstli a letter,’ Hillel said thoughtfully.
Böhni shook his head, with his mouth full. They were sitting over lunch, Böhni, whose turn it was today, on the stool, and Hillel cross-legged on the lower bunk. It was beef roulade, tough as saddle straps, with overcooked Brussels sprouts swimming in a sweetish sauce. Hillel had let Böhni have his roulade – he couldn’t get used to treyfene food, was his excuse – and ate only the bread, of which they were given half a loaf per day.
Böhni choked down a mouthful so big that his Adam’s apple practically burst out of his throat, and said. ‘You’re crazy, Rosenthal. What would you say to him?’
‘That school is important to us, blah blah, that we love it, that the trial has been a salutary lesson, that in future we will be model students. All the things my father likes to hear.’
‘What does your father have to do with it?’
‘Teachers are all the same.’
Böhni wasn’t happy about the idea. Like many people who aren’t good with words, he had far too high an opinion of all things written. ‘That’s why you believe in the Front,’ mocked Hillel. Böhni was in favour of doing nothing at all, just drawing in his head and hoping the whole business would come to nothing, at least as far as the school was concerned. After all, there had only been a small item in the papers, with no names. And besides, by the time they had sat out the three hundred francs, the summer holidays would be coming to an end; so they wouldn’t miss a single day of lessons. And Gerstli might have gone away or been otherwise engaged and wouldn’t hear a thing about the whole affair. No, the letter was a very bad idea.
They didn’t agree, but the argument about Hillel’s suggestion still filled the whole afternoon, and in fine weather, when you had to look out through the barred windows to where the sun was shining, the afternoons were always particularly long.
The next day Böhni was called to the visiting room. There was a man waiting for him there.
‘My father?’ he asked, quite startled, and involuntarily reached for his throat as if there were a noose there that someone was about to pull tight.
‘I don’t think so,’ said the warder. Today this was a cosy, elderly officer who had seen everything in his long years of service, and who set a great deal of store by his knowledge of human beings. ‘An accountant or a teacher, I would say. He’s wearing a funny polka dot bow tie.’ He looked at the docket that had to be filled out at every prison visit. ‘Gerster’s his name.’
Headmaster Gerster.
Böhni trotted behind the warder as if going to his own execution.
For the first time in more than two weeks Hillel was alone in the cell. He had the stool and the beds and the toilet all to himself, and yet it still seemed to him that the room had grown smaller, that it had shrunk like the skin over a wound when it slowly scars over.
What did Gerster want from Böhni? Why was he visiting only him?
He tried to convince himself that he wasn’t interested, he flicked through the Front and didn’t understand a word of what he read there. ‘A Jew as theatre director makes it impossible for Swiss artists to be discovered; a Jew as university teacher influences young academics against the necessary renewal of our nation.’
What sort of renewal?
Gerstli was basically not a grumpy person, but he had said clearly and distinctly that if even the smallest thing should occur . . . Expulsion, no ifs or buts. Finished, once and for all.
Why was he only visiting Böhni?
There was only a corner left of the daily ration of bread. Hillel pulled a piece out of the sticky middle and shaped it into a grey ball between the palms of his hands. He drew a mouth and two eyes in it with his fingernails. Then he flattened the head with his fist.
How long had Böhni been gone? You couldn’t take a watch with you into the cell, you had to hand it in with your other belongings.
Why had Gerster even come?
And why was he only visiting Böhni?
If he was thrown out of school . . .
‘Away with the bad apples,’ it said in the Front. ‘We don’t want the plague to spread.’
When the keys rattled outside again, Hillel was lying on the top bunk, reading. ‘A Jew in the editing room suppresses any view with which he is unhappy. A Jew as film distributor seeks only immoral films for his cinemas.’ He didn’t lower the paper when Böhni came in.
‘Come on, Rosenthal,’ said the warder’s voice. ‘Get up, come with me. A visitor for you.’
‘He wants to talk to you too,’ said Böhni.
‘What about?’
‘He asked me who it was who started all this nonsense. The instigator will be thrown out, in the case of the other he will put mercy before justice.’
‘So? What did you tell him?’
‘The truth,’ said Böhni, without looking at him.
The old warden unlocked the cell door from outside and kept the keys in his hand. They rattled with each step that he took, like bells on a harness.
The corridor smelled of cheap scouring powder.
The visiting room wasn’t much bigger than their cell. A table, a chair for the visitor, a stool for the prisoner.
Headmaster Gerster stood by the window and looked through the bars at the courtyard.
‘Ten minutes,’ said the warder.
> Ten minutes? Böhni had been away for much longer than that.
Or had it only seemed that way?
‘Grüezi, Herr Gerster.’
The headmaster turned towards him very slowly, looked at him as a doctor might look at a seriously ill patient who is beyond help, and then said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘Why do you do such things?’
‘I’m sorry, Herr Gerster.’
‘Everyone’s sorry in retrospect. It’s not enough. You have a head on your shoulders, Rosenthal! What on earth were you doing at a Front meeting?’
‘I know, it was idiotic.’
‘“Idiotic,” he says.’ Herr Gerster didn’t even raise his voice, and that scared Hillel. After the box-cart journey, when Gerstli had given them a proper earful, he had felt better. ‘Behaves like the most unreasonable ragamuffin in the whole world and then says: “idiotic”. Is it true that it was about a bet?’
Hillel nodded.
‘Give a decent answer when I ask you a question! Was it about a bet?’
‘Yes, Herr Gerster.’
‘And who started this bet?’
‘He’ll be expelled, won’t he?’
Gerster didn’t reply. He just stood there, his arms behind his back, and clapped the back of his hand impatiently into his palm.
‘Who?’
‘Böhni will be finished if you throw him out,’ said Hillel.
‘That doesn’t answer my question.’
‘They’ll finish him off in his village.’
Back of hand against palm.
‘His whole life will fall apart.’
‘I want to know who is to blame.’
On the wall there was a sign: ‘The passing over of objects is strictly forbidden.’
‘Who?’
A wooden hatch, like the one between kitchen and dining room at home, but higher up. Probably you could keep an eye on the visits from there.
‘I’m waiting.’
The sweetish taste of lunch rose up in Hillel’s throat. He swallowed.
Back of hand against palm.
‘Me,’ said Hillel. ‘I’m to blame for this.’
Gerster turned away as if he hadn’t heard him, and walked back over to the barred window as if he were about to deliver a speech to the courtyard.
‘Did you agree that in advance?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Herr Gerster.’
‘That each of you was to shoulder the blame?’
Even the visiting room smelled of cleaning fluids, but less sharply. They probably used a better product here.
‘Did Böhni say . . .?’
Gerster turned back towards him. If Hillel hadn’t known it wasn’t possible, he could have sworn that his headmaster was smiling.
‘Then I will have a great deal of difficulty discovering the true culprit. Tell Böhni, “In dubio pro reo.” He doesn’t understand Latin, but you can translate it for him.’
When the warder had left and closed the cell door, Hillel said, ‘You tried to save my skin, didn’t you, Böhni?’
Böhni was busy scratching a stick figure into the wall with the handle of his spoon, and couldn’t look up.
‘Do you know what, Rosenthal?’ he said. ‘You’re off your head.’
‘But you’re a dick,’ said Hillel.
‘At least I’m not a Jewish one.’
‘Gerster says I’m to tell you, “In dubio pro reo.”’
‘What does that mean?’
‘That I have to put up with your stupid face for another whole year of school.’
‘And I have to put up with yours,’ said Böhni. ‘That’s much worse.’
69
When Herr Grün had returned to health he went to the kosher clothes factory to quit his job.
He thanked Zalman, whom he had told, on the first day, about what had happened in the camp, and who had understood that you have to help such people.
‘If you need anything else . . .’ said Zalman.
‘I don’t need anything else.’
Herr Grün shook Rachel’s hand and said, ‘Without you I would never have got better.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Rachel.
‘I’m still wondering whether I should be grateful to you for that.’
He was always saying things like that.
‘Would you rather have died?’
‘It might have been better,’ said Herr Grün, ‘but now this is how things are.’
‘Where are you going to work from now on?’
‘I’ll send you free tickets,’ said Herr Grün. ‘You and Fräulein Pomeranz.’
He kept his word.
In the foyer of the Corso Theatre Rachel handed in her coat at the cloakroom and noticed very quickly that she had chosen too elegant a dress. Admittedly this was the premiere, but in a revue theatre like the one managed by Wladimir Rosenbaum, the word meant nothing more than all the ‘Sensationals!’, ‘Uniques!’ or ‘You’ll Weep With Laughters!’ that he splashed so liberally over his posters. There was a premiere here every few weeks, and Rachel was the only one wearing a proper evening ensemble for the occasion, in the bold, modern colour combination that Fräulein Bodmer, the directrice, had seen at Patou in Paris: skirt and jacket of red duvetine, green satin neckline. Still: the women looked at her enviously, and the men looked at her the way one likes men to look at one, so that one may assume an expression that suggests one hasn’t noticed their gaze at all.
She got there early and had to wait for Désirée. The people, it seemed to her, came to the Corso with stubbornly cheerful faces, they had decided to spend money on an enjoyable evening, and the investment was to pay itself back from the very start. The women laughed shrilly and held their fingertips, with their red lacquered nails, in front of their mouths; as they walked, the men bounced at the knee with an excess of vigour, and when they could be persuaded to buy cigarettes or a cuddly toy from the trays of the salesgirls with the page costumes, they tried to look as if they had planned the purchase from the outset.
At last Désirée arrived, right at the agreed time but much too late for Rachel’s impatience. Her hair was parted severely in the middle as always, and she was wearing a very simple brown dress with floral embroidery around the collar and the hem, ‘a young girl’s dress,’ Rachel thought, ‘and she isn’t – me neshuma – a young girl any more’. But she had to admit that Désirée, with her slender figure, could still carry off such a thing.
The usherettes were also dressed as pages, with a tight bodice that thrust out their bosoms, and flesh-coloured tights on their long legs. The peroxide blonde who showed Rachel and Désirée to their seats could have been a sister of Blandine Flückiger: a dress size of thirty-eight and a smile for every man in a ten-metre radius.
They were sitting in the expensive part of the theatre, where the seats were upholstered, and with a tiny table in front of each pair. There were also tables that sat four and six, and there the laughter and conversations were particularly noisy. Rachel saw only bottles standing on the tables and wondered whether it was also possible to order wine by the glass here. But then the waiter – a real water, not a fake page – was already bringing an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne to their table. ‘A little gift from Herr Grün,’ he said. ‘With best wishes for an enjoyable evening.’ He popped the cork and poured two glasses so precisely that the crown of foam rose over the edge and then settled back down without a single drop being wasted.
They clinked glasses – ‘To Herr Grün!’ – and then Rachel said, ‘In for a penny,’ waved over one of the page-girls with her tray and bought a programme. One franc fifty, completely meshuga. A stitcher would have had to sit at the sewing machine for a whole hour for that.
Herr Grün’s name was nowhere to be seen in the programme. They didn’t have time to wonder which of the many other names he might be hiding behind, because the orchestra was already rising from the pit on a hydraulic lift. Twelve men in glittery jackets, three saxophones, and on drums a Negro with a broad, w
hite grin. The bandleader had no baton, but instead used his clarinet to tell the musicians when to come in.
‘A little different from Fleur-Vallée.’ Rachel had wanted to whisper that to Désirée, but had had to repeat the words at the top of her voice to drown out the orchestra and the conversations going on all around them. They both laughed. In their youth no Jewish occasion was imaginable without the old conductor with the powdered nose. Every time you had to beg and plead with him to play something, and every time he just happened to have brought his violin along.
The orchestra sank back down again, the red curtain rustled open and ten girls swung their legs. They were dressed as sailors, because the title of the revue was Journey Round the World. In their final pose they turned their backs to the audience, bent low and smiled at the audience with red painted lips from between their spread legs. Fastened to their lace panties were letters spelling the words BON VOYAGE! The effect received hearty applause.
Every act on the programme was assigned to a different country, which could sometimes only be achieved with some clever bits of stage management. Thus Miss Mabel, with her trained poodles, had to represent the whole of Africa, to which end she appeared in a white tropical suit and a sola topee, and the poor creatures had crêpe paper lions’ manes tied around their heads. For the apache dance (Paris), a French accordion wailed from the pit, and during the plate-spinning (China), the orchestra did its very best to imitate the sounds of the Far East. The knife-thrower and his fearless partner wore wild west costumes; but Rachel and Désirée were sitting near enough to the stage to hear the partner cursing in a pronounced central Swiss dialect every time a knife landed too close. The girls danced the Spanish flamenco and the Russian kazachok; both countries seemed to be very thrifty with their material when it came to making the national costume.
By the interval Herr Grün still hadn’t appeared on the stage.
‘He probably won’t be on until the second half,’ said Désirée. ‘He told me once that that’s when the big acts come on.’
‘Really?’ said Rachel. ‘He told you that?’ She flicked through the programme and then said, ‘This must be him. Here: “Herbert Horowitz, the famous comedian from Berlin.’
Melnitz Page 75
