Then, very suddenly, their examination was over, there was probably a break in their timetable, or else the game had gone stale. He was allowed to get dressed, slip into his heel-less shoes and pack his belongings again. They even gave him a piece of twine to tie up his suitcase; they had only been doing their duty when they pulled out the bottom, to ensure that it wasn’t double.
The next train left in three hours, they informed him considerately, thirty-four minutes past two exactly, and no, they couldn’t let him get in here, this was purely an official stop, and use by private individuals was not permitted. But he was welcome to walk back to the border station, it was only a few kilometres, just keep following the rails, he was bound to get there in time, although walking without heels was a bit of an effort. They waved as he left, and one of the border guards who had proved particularly humorous during the procedure, called after him, ‘Goodbye, Charlie!’ – ‘He shuffles like Charlie Chaplin,’ he explained to the others, but they weren’t cinema-goers and didn’t join in.
Breathless and drenched in sweat Arthur caught the next train. The rage that he wasn’t allowed to vent on anybody stuck in his throat, a lump that couldn’t be swallowed or spat out. On any other day and on any other journey he would have turned around, immediately, he would have gone back to Zurich and hidden himself away in his flat.
But it wasn’t just any day or any journey.
The second-class carriages were all full; in the end he found a seat in a compartment full of travelling salesmen, who bunched up reluctantly for him. With his broken shoes and the twine around his suitcase he probably looked like a tramp. As he sat down, he pushed his jacket together behind him so that they didn’t see the ragged seam.
The same three guards checked him this time again, but they left him in peace and wished him a pleasant journey. They had probably decided they had had enough fun with him for one day.
He had set off from Zurich early in the morning, because he had wanted to have enough time in Kassel to freshen up in a hotel room. Now he would get there at the very last minute. If indeed he had enough time.
No, they weren’t late, the conductor reassured him. He didn’t know what it was like in Switzerland, but here in Germany the trains were punctual.
You had to admit, said an artificial honey salesman, that many things had improved. In his field at any rate, agreed a representative in leather goods, boots in particular were selling like mad. Of course one couldn’t agree with everything, a third began, there were things that actually shouldn’t have been happening. But the others didn’t want to talk politics, they preferred to get on with their card game.
Photographs hung over the seats in the compartment: festively decorated buildings with half-timbered facades and mountain-tops reflected in romantic lakes. ‘Germans, go on holiday in Germany!’ it said underneath. In one picture a girl in peasant costume carried a bunch of flowers in her arm and smiled shyly from under her beribboned bonnet.
‘I don’t even know what she looks like,’ thought Arthur.
He should have asked her, of course, he should have asked for some photographs, but at first he hadn’t even thought about it, and now there was censorship, and you didn’t know who read the letters. Everything had to look perfectly natural, as if it had all been discussed and agreed. There should be nothing to suggest that the marriage was about anything other than a Swiss passport.
So he hadn’t even formally proposed, in his letter he had acted as if everything was long since resolved between them. Without advance notice he had written to her to say that he, for his part, had the necessary papers for the marriage contract, and very much hoped that she would soon have them as well. He had also received confirmation: for the wife of a Swiss citizen, immigration was not a problem.
Irma and Moses sent their greetings and were already looking forward to showing her Switzerland. ‘Particularly the city of Zurich,’ he had added in brackets.
She had replied just as matter-of-factly, in a curt letter without surprises or objections. She just reminded him – she actually wrote ‘remind’ – please under no circumstances to forget to bring his certificate of non-Aryan descent, otherwise they would assume at the register office that he, being Swiss, was of German or congeneric blood, and then marriage to a Jewess would not be permitted.
So he had asked the Israeli Religion Society to confirm his membership, and stupidly kept the officially accredited paper in his passport, in which his religious affiliation was not recorded. If only he had simply put it in his pocket . . . ‘Meijer’ had a good Swiss ring about it, and they would probably have left him in peace.
François or even Hinda would have warned him against such recklessness, but he hadn’t told his siblings anything about his journey, his wedding trip. They would just have advised him against it. François would have listed, point by point, all the reasons why the business should not go ahead, never under any circumstances, and Hinda would have shaken her head and said, ‘Really, Arthur, one can overdo the idealism.’
For the second time in his life he had asked for a woman’s hand, and again it was a woman he didn’t know at all.
Any more than he had, that time before, known Chaje Sore Wasserstein. At least he had seen her, that evening in the tabernacle. And had immediately felt obliged . . .
He didn’t even know what she looked like.
Perhaps she was ugly. Not that it would have mattered, of course not, but if you were going to be sitting opposite one another at the table every day, if you even had to sleep in the same . . .
He had asked Dr Strauss, the lawyer, it didn’t concern him personally, he had said, it was one of his patients, but he would be interested, purely out of curiosity, what the conventions were in such a situation. The authorities examined everything, said Dr Strauss, dropped in after a year or two and checked whether the marriage actually existed. They rang your doorbell without warning, and had them show you the bathroom, whether there were really two toothbrushes in the tooth-mugs. They looked at the bedroom.
The bedroom.
Arthur couldn’t imagine that side of things.
He didn’t even know what colour her hair was.
Perhaps he would stand outside the register office and not recognise her.
Nor she him.
He had once heard about a woman, in a very Orthodox community, who had been brought together with her husband by a shadchen, and when her veil was lifted under the chuppah for the first time, she found him so ugly that she’d thrown up.
But people said it had been a happy marriage anyway.
Would she expect him to kiss her?
He was fifty-seven, and was worried that he would look awkward.
Ridiculous.
Fifty-seven.
Twenty years’ difference.
You can overdo idealism.
But Irma would smile at him with her squinting eyes. And Moses would give all the cushions in the flat a perfect dimple with the edge of his hand.
He would have to buy a few cushions. Throw out the old leather armchairs and get a sofa. So that they could sit together in the evening like a real family.
At the weekend they would go to the zoo. Once a year to the Sechseläuten parade. They’d go on holiday.
Germans, go on holiday in Germany! Germans, go on holiday in Germany!
Why was that slogan rattling through his head, to the rhythm of the wheels?
Why was he suddenly alone in the compartment?
He must have gone to sleep, he didn’t know for how short or how long a time.
Outside the windows a happy landscape passed by as if in a propaganda film.
Germans, go on holiday in Germany!
In the fields, farmers were bringing in the last harvest under a cloudless sky. In the towns contented citizens went about their business. People waited with patient expressions at railway crossings.
Everything was so normal.
Normal?
Arthur was on his way to marry a comp
lete stranger.
Perhaps he wouldn’t get there in time. Perhaps it would be impossible to get another appointment. Perhaps everything would already have been cancelled by the time he got there. What time was it anyway?
Eventually he would have to get a wrist-watch. Having to flip up a lid every time you wanted to tell the time was far too laborious. Nobody nowadays carried a watch on a heavy chain in their waistcoat pocket. He would have to change, become more mobile. Now that he had all these new obligations.
But perhaps he had missed everything anyway. Without being able to do anything about it. He had boarded the right train, the earliest one there was, but they’d taken him off that one, and the next one wasn’t until three hours later. What if the town hall wasn’t right next to the station?
No, said the conductor, long-distance trains stopped in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe. To get into town he would have to change for the local train to the station or take a taxi if he was in a great hurry.
Was he in a great hurry?
When he was a little boy looking at the panopticon, he couldn’t wait to have all the mysteries revealed to him. ‘A youth there was, who, burning with a thirst for knowledge, to Egyptian Sais came.’ And the first time he had seen Joni . . .
What was it he had said by way of farewell? ‘A family would be the best thing even for you. You’d be a wonderful father.’
Meanwhile, whenever they approached a larger town, the train slowed down, almost to a standstill, and Arthur didn’t know if he should be pleased. But in the next station they set off precisely on time. As was only proper in a country that set such store by order.
The railway track now ran through a forest, and on either side the trees were lined up in order, presenting themselves in rank and file for the woodcutters.
Through villages that looked as if they’d been built from construction kits. The same village over and over again.
Past a barracks that looked like a factory, and lots of factories that looked like barracks.
And then, much too late, much too soon, the train stopped.
Only a single taxi was waiting outside the ornate station, and at first it didn’t want to take him. Broken suitcases don’t inspire confidence, and neither do shoes without heels. It was only the banknotes in his wallet that made the driver friendlier. Arthur paid in advance, and was probably short-changed. That didn’t matter any more either.
He couldn’t have said what he had expected, but irritatingly the town they were driving through struck him as all too ordinary. There shouldn’t, it seemed to him, have been such a thing as everyday life here. But there was nothing particularly striking. People, cars, shops. Like everywhere. It could have been Zurich. If it hadn’t been for all the flags with the crooked cross.
When Arthur told him he was in a hurry, the driver seemed delighted. He pushed back his cap and honked all the other cars out of the way.
‘You’re Swiss?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Another one of ours,’ said the driver, and nodded like someone who has secret information. ‘Just like Austria. You’ll see.’
In the course of the journey he became more and more talkative, treated Arthur as a rich uncle treats a poor relative, and with proprietorial pride explained to him the sights that they were passing, the regional museum and the Torwache.
Then they were turning into Königstrasse.
The same street where Rosa Pollack’s husband had been run over.
‘Here’s the town hall,’ said the driver. ‘Do you want to visit the mayor?’
And laughed and waved to Arthur, who stood forlornly on the pavement with his twined suitcase, once again as he drove off.
The big clock over the entrance – flanked by two stone lions, that too could have been in Zurich – showed him that he had arrived on time. Ten minutes early, in fact. Now he only had to find the right room.
Was there a porter with whom he could leave his suitcase?
And then a woman came out of the town hall door, a fat, agitated woman clutching a little bunch of flowers, looked searchingly around and then hurried towards Arthur. The closer she came the more slowly she walked, more and more hesitant, looked at him as one looks at a present one can tell one doesn’t like even from a distance, but about which one must pretend to be delighted, out of pure politeness.
Looked at his suitcase, the broken shoes, the jacket with its lining hanging out. He should have kept his coat on and not carried it over his arm.
‘Arthur Meijer?’ she asked. Plainly she hoped she was mistaken. ‘Are you Arthur Meijer?’
She was so ugly.
A bloated woman who had tried to powder a better colour on her face. A brightly coloured dress that bulged all over her body. The swollen, discoloured scar of an inexpert vaccination on her left upper arm.
‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘I’m . . .’ He had first to put down his suitcase, that tied-up, unsightly relic of a suitcase, on the ground in order to doff his hat. ‘Doctor Arthur Meijer,’ he introduced himself, and involuntarily bowed slightly as he had seen little Moses do.
She shook her head in disbelief.
Hairs on her upper lip. Short, prickly hairs. Something he’d always found unbearable in a woman.
‘You’re not as I imagined,’ she said.
‘Nor you . . .’ but he had committed himself now, he had given his word without anyone asking him for it, he hadn’t given anyone the chance to talk him out of it, so it was only right that he should choke back the words on his lips right now. Instead he said, ‘Those people pulled my shoes apart.’
In her amazement she stuck out her tongue, which gave her face a babyishly stupid expression.
‘The border guards,’ he tried to explain. ‘They took me off the train and . . .’
‘We’ve got to hurry.’ She breathed out deeply, as one does before unpleasant or unavoidable decisions, and then, before he could do it himself, picked up his suitcase. Even though it wasn’t a very hot day, she had patches of sweat under her arms.
In silence, and without even checking that he was following her, she stamped her way up the stairs in front of him. ‘Legs like fat Christine,’ he thought. It was only when they got to the third floor that she stopped by a door, not even breathing heavily, as one might have expected given her weight, and told him, ‘In fact the smart wedding room is downstairs, all carved oak, but it’s only for Aryan marriages.’
‘Yes,’ he said resignedly, ‘then we’ll just have to get on with it,’ and was about to give her his arm. She looked at him, as she had been looking at him all the time, with disbelief and disappointment, and stepped aside. ‘Let’s hope it’s the right thing,’ she said. ‘Give me your coat and your hat. It’s better if your hands are free. And hurry up! Rosa’s already waiting in there.’
72
The next morning they were at the station before sunrise. If there had been an earlier train, they would have taken it. Arthur was in a hurry to get back to Switzerland, and Rosa couldn’t wait not to be in Germany any more.
They were sitting opposite one another and they were married.
They had set off while it was still dark. Now it was gradually brightening outside, but neither of them felt like looking out of the window.
In this compartment too there was a picture frame above each seat, but the frames were empty. The photographs had probably shown something undesirable, and they’d had no time to replace them.
There was much to talk about, but they sat mutely facing one another, only every now and again saying inconsequential things as one might to a stranger. ‘No, I don’t mind not facing the front,’ or ‘It looks like it might rain.’
He asked none of the questions that really interested him, because they didn’t know where to start. ‘It’s like that first term,’ thought Arthur, ‘when I took the big anatomy atlas home and didn’t dare to open it for two days. I was too scared of having to memorise it all.’
Reality ran after the train and couldn’t catch u
p with it.
They sat opposite one another.
Her face, he could find no other terms to describe it, was precise, with clear, distinct lines, as if drawn by a draftsman who doesn’t hesitate when he sets down his strokes. A confident nose and a resolute chin. Hair shorter than was fashionable in Switzerland, almost a boyish cut. Her earlobes had once been pierced and were growing closed again. Perhaps she had had to sell her earrings.
‘You’re looking at me as if you want to learn me off by heart,’ said Rosa.
But he hadn’t even got that far. He was only just starting to spell her out.
She wasn’t beautiful, no one would have said that of her at first glance, but then not every woman is a woman for the first glance. It was easy to imagine looking at her anew, over and over again, across a table.
Or from bed to bed.
No, he couldn’t imagine that.
‘It’ll be all right,’ she said, having read his thoughts. ‘We managed that thing yesterday.’
And she suddenly burst out laughing.
‘Like my sister,’ he thought. ‘When Hinda was still a girl, she would suddenly explode with laughter for no good reason.’
Rosa had a very young laugh. And she was the mother of two children, with a fate and with memories that must have hurt.
A young laugh.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But the fact that you actually mistook my friend Trude for the bride . . . Admit it, you like her more than me! Admit it: you’re sorry that you had to take me instead of her.’
It had been a strange wedding. Even standing outside that town hall, in a suit like a homeless man standing in worn-out shoes at the door of strange houses, begging for a bowl of soup. That was probably what he had looked like. Or when they had been supposed to swap the rings and he couldn’t get them off his key-ring. Tugged away at them and apologised at the same time. Until she took the keys and liberated the rings.
Melnitz Page 78
