Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘Horowitz?’

  ‘He must have come up with a new pseudonym or himself. These variety people often do that.’

  The gesture with which she waved over the waiter was appropriate in its elegance for the expensive seats. She asked for the champagne to be topped up, and when Désirée held her hand defensively over her own glass, she said, ‘It’s a shame to let something so expensive go to waste.’

  In the second part of the revue the Great Karnak, a magician with a turban and a Viennese accent, locked his assistant in a box and pierced her with swords. Miss Mabel made another appearance, this time without her poodles, and sang a saucy chanson with the refrain, ‘That’s just the way of the world.’ Three muscle men painted gold and bronze stretched themselves into poses that contradicted all the laws of gravity. The half-naked women belly-danced as Arabs, and twitched their backsides to the Black Bottom. Then at last the time came. Director Wladimir Rosenbaum, who had guided the audience through the programme in the best-cut tailcoat that Rachel had ever seen, introduced Herbert Horowitz, ‘the darling of the Berlin audience and star of the Comics’ Cabaret!’

  Horowitz wasn’t Herr Grün.

  He was a short, fat, scruffy little man in an ill-fitting dinner jacket. His speciality was suggestive stories, delivered in a fake Jewish accent, each story being announced with the words, ‘A few more bits from Horowitz!’ His appearance was received with resounding laughter, especially at those tables where they had had emptied more than one bottle in the course of the evening. He told the story of the man who calls for help because his mother-in-law wants to throw herself out of the window and can’t open it all by herself, and the joke about the Jewish salesman who orders a burnt schnitzel and overcooked potatoes in the restaurant because he wants to eat as he does at home.

  It was terrible.

  But it was popular.

  When the girls had shrieked and lifted their skirts through the closing cancan, there was enthusiastic final applause. Director Rosenbaum, who bowed in the middle of his ensemble under a hail of confetti, was visibly pleased.

  ‘But what’s happened to Herr Grün?’ Rachel wondered. ‘If he wasn’t even on the bill, where did he get the free tickets from?’

  Désirée shrugged.

  Herr Grün had told them just to stay in their seats after the performance and he would come and get them from their table, but he was keeping them waiting for a long time.

  ‘Such a rude man!’ Rachel complained.

  ‘You’re interested in him, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Rachel. ‘What makes you think such a thing?’

  The audience had gone, and the hall, so festive just a moment before, quickly returned to the everyday. The elegant pages were now only women with sore feet; the permanent smiles had slipped from their faces, and the seductive twitter vanished from their voices. The waiters were all flat footed, and walked down the rows of seats in their shirtsleeves, collecting empty bottles and glasses.

  The curtain was open again, but the stage was now just a big empty space without any magic at all. Two stage hands were sweeping up confetti.

  At last Herr Grün arrived, from the wings, across the stage, and hurriedly down the few steps into the auditorium. He was wearing his old three-piece suit. Was it actually the only one he had? His coat was over his arm, and he was holding his hat in his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There was a problem with Wurmser’s cape.’

  ‘Who is Wurmser?’

  ‘The Great Karnak. He got stuck on a nail behind the stage.’

  ‘Why am I interested in your magician?’ Two decades before, Rachel’s feigned rudeness would have seemed like a tease. Now she was often just rude. ‘And why am I interested in his cape?’

  ‘It’s part of my job,’ said Herr Grün. ‘I am the chief dresser here in the theatre. It’s a bit closer to home than the Kamionker clothes factory.’

  ‘Cloakroom attendant?’

  ‘There are worse jobs. I learned sewing from you.’

  ‘Congratulations on your new post,’ said Désirée. ‘But if you won’t take my question amiss, Herr Grün – wouldn’t you rather be on the stage?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘And I’d like to be a millionaire. Or the King of England.’

  ‘But you’re at least ten times better than that Horowitz chap.’

  ‘Horowitz!’ Herr Grün laughed. ‘In Zurich he’s the sensation of Berlin. In Berlin nobody’s ever heard of him.’

  ‘And you . . .?’

  ‘Come,’ Herr Grün interrupted. ‘We must collect your coats.’

  The weary girls in the page costumes, the waiters, the old lady in the cloakroom – they were all very polite to Herr Grün, as people treat an abdicated noble with exaggerated correctness precisely when he insists on remaining incognito.

  Rachel asked her question again in the street. ‘If you’re so much better than this Horowitz fellow, and more famous too, why don’t they engage you?’

  ‘Of course Wladimir has offered to do just that.’ He called the theatre director by his first name, but without sounding smarmy. ‘But I can’t take to the stage. Never again.’

  ‘Because you don’t have a partner any more?’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Because I will always have my partner.’

  He insisted on offering them another glass of wine. ‘I have much to be grateful to you for.’

  ‘I’m already quite tiddly,’ Rachel objected.

  ‘And it suits you very well.’

  It was the first time she had heard anything like a compliment from him.

  They walked along side by side, Herr Grün in the middle, Rachel and Désirée on either side of him, taking an arm each. Twenty years before, Rachel had often strolled through the city at night like that, with an admirer on each side and her whole life ahead of her.

  Herr Grün took them to the White Cross, a pub to which ‘one’ did not go, because the only people who did were those who didn’t distinguish between drinking and getting drunk. The two women came along without demur; Rachel because she didn’t want to appear like a fuddy-duddy, and Désirée because she didn’t know about the pub’s bad reputation.

  It wasn’t far from the theatre to Rössligasse. Herr Grün opened the door, and they were standing in front of a wall of noise, smoke and clinking glasses.

  The pub was cramped, and there wasn’t a single empty seat to be seen. But they seemed to know Herr Grün, and freed a table for him. One guest stood up voluntarily, protectively clutching his beer glass to his chest with both hands, a second who had fallen asleep over his glass was lifted away and sat back down next to two others on a bench, where he immediately put his head on the table and went on sleeping.

  The landlady herself wiped down the table with a cloth, or distributed the puddles of beer and wine more evenly. ‘The usual?’ she said to Herr Grün, and when he nodded, ‘And the ladies?’ Her tone made it clear that they weren’t equipped for ladies here. Never before had Rachel felt so out of place in her elegant dress.

  ‘Half a litre of white wine.’ Herr Grün didn’t specify the variety. Such refinements were not called for in the White Cross.

  He looked around, as if to make sure that everything was in its place, and said, ‘I like coming here. A place for people who want to forget. That suits me.’

  Rachel wrinkled her nose. It was a facial expression that she had got used to in the days when she was much in demand. It had been cute back then. ‘It isn’t very elegant here.’

  Herr Grün pushed a few bits of cigarette ash together into a little pile with a beer mat. ‘Depends what you compare it to,’ he said.

  The landlady brought the carafe of wine. She set a big glass of clear liquid don in front of Herr Grün.

  ‘Schnapps?’ said Désirée, without reproach.

  ‘Water,’ said Herr Grün. ‘I like to allow myself something good.’

  Rachel studied her own glass suspiciously and w
iped the rim with her handkerchief. Herr Grün smiled.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she asked.

  ‘You know something, Fräulein Kamionker? You shouldn’t mix coffee with your henna. Once you’ve got used to it, the colour really suits you.’

  She didn’t understand this man.

  A few tables away a drunk stood up, reached unsteadily for the back of his chair and dragged it – as a support or as a weapon – over to the three. A tall, thickset man with a puffy face, an athlete who had let himself go, or a worker who drank too much. He placed the chair next to their table, sat down and leaned over to Rachel.

  ‘Princess,’ said the man. ‘You’re a princess.’

  You could hear the alcohol in his voice.

  ‘I’m the king,’ said the drunk man. ‘Princess and king. Do you notice anything?’

  ‘Please leave us alone.’ Later Rachel would claim she had remained quite calm.

  ‘Come home with me,’ said the man. ‘I’ll show you my sceptre.’ He laughed, and when no one at the table joined in, he repeated more loudly, ‘My sceptre. You understand? Sceptre!’

  ‘That’ll do.’ Herr Grün said it quite calmly, but the man’s head spun around as if someone had cracked a whip.

  ‘You can’t say that to me.’

  ‘You want to check?’ asked Herr Grün. His voice hadn’t got any louder, but all conversations fell silent in the White Cross, and someone shook the sleeping man at the next table awake to say to him, ‘You can’t miss this!’

  The drunk man looked at Herr Grün.

  Herr Grün tilted his head slightly to one side, not menacingly, just asking amicably.

  How would you like it?

  The drunk man started laughing, not very convincingly, and said, ‘We’re jolly people here. Jolly people. You can take a joke, can’t you?’ And then, to Herr Grün and not at all to Rachel, ‘Excuse me. I’m sorry. It wasn’t meant in a nasty way.’ He got off, dragged his chair back to his table, sat down with his back to them and didn’t turn round again.

  All around them the conversations struck up again, but no longer quite as loudly as before.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rachel.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ said Herr Grün.

  Désirée ran her fingernail along the rim of her wine glass. ‘He’s stronger than you,’ she said without looking at Herr Grün. ‘He could have beaten you up.’

  ‘Beatings aren’t a matter of strength. It depends how far you’re prepared to go.’

  ‘How far would you go for me?’ The alarm was over, and Rachel’s voice was flirty again.

  ‘No one hits me any more,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Not any more.’ He took a deep draught from his water glass. ‘I’m skilled.’

  ‘What does that actually mean?’

  ‘You live here in Switzerland,’ he said ‘you can’t understand. On an island you don’t know what it means to drown. I had to learn to swim. If you didn’t do that . . .’

  He raised both hands above his head and let them fall back down on the table.

  ‘You’re talking about your friend Blau,’ said Désirée quietly. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘His name was Schlesinger. Siegfried Schlesinger. Studied German. Knew the Merseburg Charms off by heart, and when he was in a good mood he liked to recite poems in Middle High German. “Du bist beslozzen in minem herzen. Verlorn ist daz slüzzelin, du muost immer drinne sin.” Beslozzen in minem herzen. Locked in my heart,’ Herr Grün repeated and drank his water as if it was schnapps.

  ‘He would have liked to be a teacher, but for some reason they wouldn’t have him. They wanted to have him as Herr Blau.’

  Guten Tag, Herr Blau.

  Guten Tag, Herr Grün.

  ‘Brought a different book to the dressing room every day. If reading books made you fat we’d have had to swap roles.’ Herr Grün laughed, and again it was that pickled laugh from the basement.

  ‘He had a funny face. Sticking-out ears. That was his good fortune on stage and his misfortune in the camp. He stood out, and if you stand out you haven’t a chance.’

  He waved to the landlady, as impatient as a drinker whose alcohol has run out. She brought him his next glass of water and he drank greedily.

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘If you hit someone with a stick, it sounds different from when you use a whip. Did you know that? With a glove it’s different from when you use your bare hand. Some people didn’t even punch. They preferred to kick. They made you stand bolt upright and then rammed their knee into your privates. Everyone has his own style. Like comics on the stage. There were also double-acts. Just as Grün and Blau were double-acts. One punched, the other kicked. If you have the right partner you understand each other implicitly.

  ‘You can’t understand that, here in Switzerland. In the auditorium you don’t really understand what’s happening on stage.

  ‘Beslozzen in minem herzen,’ said Herr Grün. ‘Verlorn ist daz slüzzelin. Lost is the key.’

  ‘Herr Blau . . .’ Désirée began to frame a question.

  ‘His name was Schlesinger.’

  ‘Herr Schlesinger – did he die in the camp?’

  ‘No,’ said Herr Grün. ‘It was much worse. They let us go.’

  70

  He stood up so suddenly and violently that his chair fell over, just left it lying there and said into the sudden silence in the pub, ‘We’re going.’ He threw a handful of coins on the table – he carried his money loose in his pocket, something that people usually do only when the small change doesn’t matter – spoke into the gap between Rachel and Désirée as if someone invisible were sitting there, or as if he couldn’t look them in the face, and repeated impatiently, ‘Let’s go.’ Didn’t help them into their coats, did hold the door out for them, but not like a gentleman, more like a bouncer, and outside in the alleyway he made so quickly for the Limmat Quai and Münster Bridge that they practically had to run after him.

  Then, in the middle of the bridge, he suddenly stopped, had a very old, sad face and said, ‘I’m sorry. You think you’ll get used to it, but . . . You don’t. You just don’t . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No,’ said Herr Grün. ‘I do. Otherwise it will never get better.’

  All three together, yet apart, they walked from the Münsterhof to the St Peterhofstatt, and then up a narrow, dark path to the Lindenhof, sat down on one of the benches where lovers usually sit, or drunks, looked out over the Limmat and down at the meat market, the dark façades of the guild-houses, the empty windows of the museum society, and waited for Herr Grün to find the words he needed for his healing.

  The night was warm. The moon lit the square as the cold neon light lit the sewing room in Zalman’s factory. On a fountain a woman stood in full armour and guarded the unthreatened city. Everything was still. Only sometimes did a heavy beetle buzz over their heads as if on its way to deliver an important message or drop a bomb somewhere.

  ‘They set us free in the summer of 1936,’ Herr Grün said at last. ‘Because of the Olympic Games.’

  The weeks of the Summer Olympics, he said, were an exceptional time in Germany. The dictatorship took a holiday, outwardly at least. The tourists wanted to see a Berlin that was open to the world, so the order was issued by the Propaganda Ministry to present them with a Berlin that was open to the world. The way one might take the backdrop of a long-forgotten play out of the props room. Iron the mothballed costumes. Have the music played one last time.

  ‘They’d always known a lot about show business,’ said Herr Grün with the reluctant acknowledgement that one grants to the professionalism of an unloved branch of something. Yes, their actual speciality might have been mass marches and rallies, but a good director can stage anything that the management puts on the bill. Olympic tolerance is an easy exercise in that respect. Particularly when you have enough extras at your disposal. A whole country full of extras. You just have to be careful that no e
mbarrassing details disturb the beautiful picture as a whole.

  So on the Ku’damm the ‘Jews unwelcome’ stickers on the shop doors were suddenly no longer desirable. The glass Stürmer cases around the Olympic stadium stopped showing hate-filled caricatures, and instead displayed pictures of defiant-looking athletes. And at the Wannsee beach baths they took down the signs saying that ‘bathing is forbidden for Jews and those with skin conditions.’ Berlin smartened itself up. Put a white waistcoat over its brown shirt.

  It was just for a few weeks, after all.

  They took away the seals and padlocks from the doors of the long-closed cabarets and gay bars. The international guests wanted to enjoy themselves, they expected the wicked pleasures of the big city, and their expectations were to be fulfilled. The performers were at hand, in fact. They were all sitting in the camps. You just had to take their striped suits off them and put their old costumes back on. It was still all there. The feather boas for the transvestites and the tailcoats for the masters of ceremonies.

  It was only for a few weeks.

  ‘We were to tread the boards again,’ said Herr Grün. ‘“If you’re not willing to join in, you stay in the camp,” they said. Which amounted to, “Would you rather live, or would you rather be beaten to death?” We had a free choice.

  ‘We even got our names back. On loan. Suddenly I was Felix Grün again, rather than prisoner 4892. That was my number in the camp.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rachel quietly.

  ‘We were to play the old sketches. Including the dialogue about the apples. Particularly that one.’

  The text was placed on the table in front of them. Someone had sat at one of the shows and written it down. Word for word. They were to play it again exactly like that. With the punchline about the browns that had to be got rid of and the joke about the Reich that’s not for eating, it’s for throwing up. ‘And if you can think of anything especially pointed about us,’ said the man in the brown uniform, ‘don’t hold back. We’re not like that. We’ve got a sense of humour.’

  ‘And after the Games?’ one of them dared to ask.