Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘Perhaps I should really . . .’ the girl began to protest, but she wasn’t used to contradicting people.

  Seen from close to, Mina had an unusually interesting face which, like the optical illusions that Arthur collected with such enthusiasm, seemed to tell a quite different story from one glance to the next. At one moment Mina was an intimidated girl who hardly dared look up from the floor, and a moment later an adult woman who had had to experience far too much already.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because of her illness,’ Chanele though. ‘Suffering can make you old. Or childish.’

  They talked about unimportant things, passing the obligatory trivia to one another, as one passes salt or the bread basket at the dinner table. Only one thing that Mina said made Chanele prick her ears up. ‘Do you sometimes have the feeling,’ she asked out of nowhere, ‘that people only talk so they don’t have to listen?’

  The general chat meandered like a river without waterfalls, through the most varied subjects, and landed at last with the plebiscite which was due that summer.

  ‘What will your Pinchas do,’ Mimi was asked, ‘if shechita is banned in Switzerland?’

  ‘He’s quite sure that the initiative will not be passed. Shechita is one of the most painless methods of slaughtering that there are. If one only explains that sensibly to people . . .’

  ‘Sensibly?’ Zippora Meisels grimly shook her head with its flaming red wig. ‘It would be the first time reason had achieved anything against rish’es.’

  A whole row of wigs was seen to nod thoughtfully. Rish’es, the collective word for every kind of anti-Jewishness, is always a convincing argument.

  ‘My husband’s business friends’, Malka Grünfeld said with the pride of a woman for whom it always comes as a pleasant surprise that her husband even has any business friends, ‘all assure him that they will vote against the plebiscite.’

  ‘Initiative,’ a voice corrected her. ‘It’s an initiative.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it’s called,’ Malka said loftily. ‘The matter will be rejected in any case.’

  ‘If people had to state their opinion publicly, perhaps.’ Mina had so far only spoken when she was spoken to, and the surprised reactions clearly showed that in this particular circle they did not like it when unexperienced young things opened their mouths. Nonetheless Mina went on, although she avoided looking anyone in the eye. ‘But such a vote is not public. You just have to put a Yes or a No on your piece of paper and no one sees what they throw into the urn.’

  ‘My husband’s business partners . . .’ Malka Grünfeld began again.

  ‘One must take things as they are,’ Mina said, actually interrupting the president of the Hachnasat Kallah Association. ‘There’s no point in pretending.’

  ‘Quite right!’ said Chanele, so loudly that everyone looked at her. Then she apologised to the ladies because she absolutely couldn’t miss the train to Baden.

  When Pinchas came home at last from his conversation with Dr Stern, Chanele had left again, taking Hinda with her.

  ‘She came with me to the clothes collection,’ Mimi said, concealing behind voluble lists of trivia the things that she wanted to keep to herself, ‘although she really hasn’t been brought up for such occasion. And afterwards she was suddenly in a great hurry, you know how she is. Hinda wasn’t happy to go with her. They even had an argument about it. Even though there’s a fair in Baden at the weekend, the little one absolutely wanted to stay in Zurich for Shabbos, one might have imagined there was nothing more important to her in the world. It’s always so cosy at our house, she says. But do you know what I think? You’ll never guess! Do you know what I think?’

  ‘My dear,’ said Pinchas, ‘if I could translate every page of Gemara as easily as I can your face, I would be the greatest Talmid Chochem in the world.’

  ‘So, what am I thinking?’

  ‘You’re thinking: Zalman Kamionker.’ He put his arm around his wife and drew her to him. ‘Don’t look so disappointed. It wasn’t a very hard task. The young man inquired so insistently after Hinda today . . .’

  ‘But you don’t know about the other story,’ Mimi consoled herself, feeling her new-found friendship with Chanele as a precious warmth within her.

  Pinchas too had something to report, the crazy tale of a rabbi who had become an atheist, and now tried to prove the worthlessness of the Talmud using Talmudic quotations. On the way home he had firmly undertaken, when telling it, to stress only the comical aspects of the story, and to give no sign of how troubled he had been by the discussion. But he didn’t get round to it for the time being, because at that moment Regula brought in a letter that had arrived that afternoon. She didn’t bring it in on a tray, as Mimi had been trying to teach her for weeks, but had set it down on a perfectly ordinary plate like a slice of bread.

  ‘Ah, les servants!’ Mimi sighed, and Regula marched out, insulted. You don’t have to know foreign languages to notice when someone’s talking disparagingly about you.

  The letter was addressed in old-fashioned writing and green ink. In a skilfully embellished hand it said, ‘Pinchas Pomeranz, Esquire.’ Pinchas tore open the envelope – with his fingernail, even though Mimi had given him a letter opener with an ivory handle! – cast his eyes over the contents and frowned in puzzlement.

  ‘Do you know who’s written to me?’ he said, imitating Mimi’s voice. ‘You’ll never guess.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The letter is from Endingen.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The father of your friend Anne-Kathrin!’

  ‘The schoolmaster?’

  ‘He signs his letter as chair of the Popular Education Association. Which he always talked about. So he actually did set it up.’

  ‘What does he want from you?’

  ‘He’s planning a public event: “Arguments pro and contra shechita slaughtering.” In the hall at the Guggenheim. He wants to invite me as a speaker.’

  ‘Are you going?’

  Pinchas carefully folded the letter and put it in his pocket.

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  27

  He hadn’t played truant, Arthur said to himself, not really. You had to go to school, it was even a law. Even if you were two minutes late, there was one on the hand with the ruler, and sometimes even if you just made a face that a teacher didn’t like. He’d never dared just to stay away from school. Even after the chickenpox, when he had a letter excusing him, signed by Janki Meijer in person, even then he had gone back trembling, and even dabbed spots on his face with white zinc ointment so that people really believed he was ill.

  But the bar mitzvah instruction, he persuaded himself, that was something else completely. It was voluntary, as you could tell from the fact that it took place not in a classroom but at Cantor Würzburger’s house, in a room that always smelled of sal ammoniac pastilles that the cantor sucked for his voice. Otherwise, for ramming the Torah passages and the droosh down people’s throats, Würzburger was paid a fixed sum; Arthur always had to bring him the envelope at the start of the month. Surely he would be pleased to have to give one lesson less for the same amount of money.

  Arthur hadn’t just stayed away, either, he had hatched a plan which, if everything went as it should, would make him invisible in a way for an hour or two. Immediately after lunch, at a time when the cantor, to relax his vocal cords, always took a little nap, he had called in with Frau Würzburger and, coughing violently, told her he was unfortunately a bit feverish, and hoarse as well. His voice had been quite quiet and weak, half out of dissemblance and half out of fear. Did she think, he had asked, that he should still come to the lesson after school? She had most strictly forbidden him to do so, because Frau Würzburger knew, exactly as Arthur did, her husband’s terror of everything to do with hoarseness. So everything had gone as he had expected.

  Arthur had worked everything out very precisely. Even if Frau Würzburger were to inquire of Mama, on Shabbos in shul, perhaps, whether her younges
t was feeling better, it wouldn’t prompt any suspicion. Arthur was often sickly, and Chanele would only think he’d had his headaches during the lesson again.

  He was not practised in these matters. Shmul wouldn’t have had so many scruples; in his school days he had played truant as a matter of course, and always found a fellow pupil to lie for him. And Hinda wasn’t afraid of anything anyway. She had even, when she was as old as Arthur was now, come up with tests of courage, had once gone into a shop where Jews were treated in an unfriendly way, and asked for a hundred grammes of ‘Klaff Tea’, before running away, laughing loudly. Of course the shop-owner couldn’t have known that ‘klafte’ is more or less the worst word in Yiddish that one can use about a woman, but Arthur would never have dared to do anything like that. He suffered from the fearfulness that goes hand in hand with an overactive imagination: it was too easy for him to imagine all the things that could go wrong.

  But today he simply had to play truant. On the Gstühl – it had been the main topic of conversation at break-time that morning – the Panopticon had arrived, a first herald of the spring fair at the weekend, and he knew: if he didn’t go there straight away, today, he would have lost his chance. At the autumn fair the same company had once been in Baden, two of his classmates had visited it and reported the most marvellous things, but then the rumour had spread in town that there were objects on display in there that endangered public morals, and all the pupils at the pro-gymnasium had been forbidden to go there. Some had crept in anyway, but Arthur had been unable to summon the courage to defy such an emphatic prohibition, had stood for a long time in helpless longing outside the colourful booth, repeatedly listening to the barker’s patter: ‘Thirty rappen entrance! Children pay half!’ His imagination had had six months to dream of the marvels he had missed, in ever more glowing colours, and meanwhile the pictures in his head had become entirely irresistible. Early in the morning he had pinched three five-rappen coins from his savings box; Shmul had once shown him how to do that with a knife and a knitting needle. All day he had been restless and impatient, for fear that there might be another prohibition this year too, but there had been none as yet, and the old one, or at least one might convince oneself that this was the case, must no longer be valid. So there was something like a gap in the law through which he had to slip today, because tomorrow was Friday, when he went home straight after school to prepare himself for the service, nothing was possible on Shabbos anyway, and at this time of year it got dark so late that he wouldn’t be allowed out after Havdole either. And by Sunday . . . Not only did the time till then seem unbearably long, the fear of missing the great event for a second time was for once stronger than any prudence.

  The Gstühl Square, where the donkeys waited in the summer so that the spa guests could ride on the Baldegg and drink milk still warm from the cow, was almost empty. Only a few particularly early market traders had already secured the best spots for themselves and, with their carts, marked out the future thoroughfares of a town of booths and stands, as adventurous and transient as the gold-digging settlements in California that Arthur had read about.

  Two staked bony horses snuffled morosely around in the feedbags around their necks before the Panopticon, which stood there still almost in its under-garments, like Mama before someone’s deft hands fingered all the little hooks into the eyes. The front of the booth was still bare, a forbidding surface of stained canvas, quite without the brightly painted panels that Arthur had gazed at so longingly in the autumn. They had shown a Roman gladiator blocking the path of a charging lion, while a woman in white knelt in the sand with her hands folded in prayer; a man in a turban had whipped along a column of dark-haired slaves with heavy shackles around their necks; a martyr, bleeding from countless wounds, had smiled mildly and forgivingly from below his halo; a knight had fought a dragon and a stag carried a flaming cross in its antlers. All these wondrous pictures were still stored in one of the two huge carts in which, it seemed to Arthur, a whole world could have been transported. They were not, like ordinary removal carts, simply painted with water-resistant dark green paint, but with an oversized portrait of the barker that Arthur remembered so clearly, an imposing man in an admiral’s uniform decorated with all kinds of ribbons and medals, with a majestically twirled moustache, beside which Shmul’s looked as childishly insignificant as a rocking horse beside a dashing steed. The painted promoter pointed with a stick at a panel bearing the inscription: Staudinger’s Panoptikon, Johann Staudinger Wdw. Under that someone had added, in a different colour and in letters that jostled one another in the tight remaining space, Owner: Marian Zehntenhaus.

  The till had already been set up on the low podium next to the entrance. In the autumn it had been draped with an embroidered green velvet blanket with gold sequins; the woman who took the money from the visitors and put it in a heavy iron box was wrapped in a veil of the same colour, and a row of golden coins hung over her forehead. Now the table was stripped of its magic, as ordinary and everyday as the wrapping table in the Emporium, and that made Arthur strangely sad.

  He had walked quite close up to the table the till sat on, but there was no one there to take his fifteen rappen. He even knocked on the scratched wood with one of his precious five-rappen pieces, as Papa did on Sunday outings to call the waiter over, but nothing moved. The only sound was the rustle and snap of the lengths of canvas. After all the calm, sunny days, over the last hour a strong wind had risen up, chasing dark clouds across the sky.

  ‘What are you doing there, you little beggar?’ called a voice.

  A man came climbing down from one of the wagons, big and strong, with loose trousers stuck into the top of his boots, with braces that stretched across his shirt with the rolled-up sleeves, as wide as an arba kanfes, and above all with a device strapped over his face which, at first glance, looked as if it was made of metal, as if the man in the iron mask had managed to escape from the Bastille and in some inexplicable manner found the way to Baden. But on closer inspection it was only a leather moustache strap. It was fastened so tightly that the man could not really move his mouth; when he spoke he sounded as if he had no teeth.

  ‘What do you want?’ the man asked again and came menacingly closer.

  Arthur held out the three coins on the open palm of his hand. ‘I want to go to the Panopticon,’ he said, and because he felt he needed to explain the fifteen rappen, he added unnecessarily, ‘I’m a child.’

  Two suspicious eyes looked at him so keenly that Arthur’s muscles were already tensing to run away. Then the man scratched himself carefully under his open shirt for a long time, spat, turned away and returned to the cart. ‘Come again tomorrow. We’re not open yet.’

  ‘Tomorrow I can’t.’ There is a kind of despair that feels almost like courage, and it was that despair that sent Arthur running after the man. ‘Please,’ he said, and realised that tears were welling up in him as inexorably as storm clouds in the sky. ‘Isn’t there a possibility even so that I might . . .? I’ll even pay the adult price. I can bring you another fifteen rappen, but not until Sunday.’

  The man thought for a moment and then stretched his hand out. He didn’t take the money, however, but rested his fingers on Arthur’s upper arm and pressed it as if performing an examination. ‘Are you strong?’ he asked. ‘My old woman has drunk too much and is no use for anything. If you help me shift the last few things, you can look at everything for free afterwards.’

  It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Arthur in his whole life.

  The whole cart had been almost cleared. If you climbed in – the loading space was high up, and Arthur had to lie on his stomach before pulling in his legs and then his feet – it was as if you were in a cave; footsteps echoed on the board floors, and it smelt musty, as Arthur imagined bats did. The cart was empty, there only a few figures wrapped in coarse sackcloth at the very back, some of them secured with straps that looked like dirty white belts. The protective packaging hid their shapes; it was
impossible to tell whether they represented men or women, whether they were queens, murderers or Indians. Arthur recalled the poem about the veiled picture in Sais that he had had to learn by heart for school: ‘A youth there was who, burning with a thirst for knowledge, to Egyptian Sais came . . .’

  His task was to loosen the straps and push the figures to the edge of the cart where Herr Zehntenhaus – for it was the owner of all these precious objects in person who had taken him on to do the job – tipped them over his shoulder and carried them inside the booth. Arthur was worried at first that he might break something, snap off a finger or even a head, but the figures were much more stable and also much heavier than he had expected; with the bigger ones he had to make a huge effort even to move them. ‘Only the outer layer is made of wax, there’s always a plaster core inside,’ explained Herr Zehntenhaus who, every other time he came back with the empty sacks, liked to break for a chat to get his breath back. When he did he took the moustache strap off his face, wiped off the sweat underneath and then let it spring back into place with a damp smack. ‘Basically I hate moustaches,’ he said, ‘but it’s just expected of a fairground barker.’

  At last the cart was cleared. Only one single figure, smaller and wider than the others, was left. ‘The Holy Virgin got broken on me,’ said Herr Zehntenhaus. ‘I haven’t yet found anyone who can fix her.’

  He helped Arthur down from the cart and led him to the rear of the booth, where a corner of the canvas was held up and fasted on a nail. ‘Then I’ll just look in quickly on my old lady,’ he said, pushed Arthur through the opening and let the makeshift door fall shut behind him.

  Arthur felt he was in paradise. He wasn’t just in the forbidden Panopticon, he was there as the only visitor, before everyone else, and today all these unimagined treasures belonged to him alone. At that moment he wouldn’t even have swapped places with Janki, who had been at the World’s Fair in Paris and seen all of Edison’s inventions. The sky outside had turned gloomy. Not so much light was filtering in through the gaps where the canvas had been folded away into triangular windows. Arthur enjoyed the mysterious gloom in which one could be fearful without being really frightened.