Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  In training, his partner was usually Joni Leibowitz, who was in the same weight category. They were a good pairing, Sally Steigrad thought, as he looked at them. They often worked together on their technique, when the others were already getting dressed again.

  Arthur couldn’t have explained what happened between himself and Joni during this time, although in sleepless nights he analysed every look caught by chance – by chance? – and every offhand remark for hidden meanings. He had never been in love before, and could not interpret the condition that assailed him, could not begin to interpret that illness. No one had ever told him that love is confusion above all.

  Joni was only seventeen, an apprentice in his uncle’s stationery shop, and reacted with much greater calm than the doctor with all his book-learning. He interpreted Arthur’s vague feelings before he really understood them himself, and seemed to fee neither hurt nor threatened by them. He played quite unselfconsciously with the power they gave him over the older man, and he did that without any malice, just as a cat feels no hatred for the mouse that it allows to escape and catches again and allows to escape and catches again. Whether Joni returned his love – yes, it was love, Arthur had had to admit it, and since then felt strangely relieved – whether he felt the same or at least something similar, that was a question to which Arthur never found a certain answer, right until the end.

  Arthur won his first bout, quite to his own surprise. It was in the return round of the championship – the more modest the sporting achievements, the more seriously one takes rules and plans – and the Jewish Gymnastics Club was already abjectly at the bottom of the table. The opposing team was the same one as the one at Arthur’s very first visit to the gym, the Workers’ Gymnastics Club from Wiedikon, all people who did hard physical work in the factory day after day, and who had chosen wrestling as a sport because they needed an outlet for their surplus strength at the weekend as well. Arthur faced the same man who had defeated and injured Joni, who had dared to hurt Joni, and when he felt the man’s hairy arm against his body, he was suddenly assailed, for the first time in his life, which had hitherto always been mild and theoretical, with such boundless fury that they had had finally to drag him off his opponent, because he refused to relax his neck wrench long after his opponent had knocked on the mat as a sign of giving in.

  ‘Now we’ve taught you how to give it an edge,’ Sally Steigrad said, and attributed this success to himself as well.

  Afterwards they stood side by side at the wash basin. Joni threw his curl out of his forehead and said, ‘I know what you want from me.’ They called each other ‘du’, of course, fellow sportsmen call each other ‘du’, there’s nothing special about it. ‘I know what you want,’ said Joni, ‘but you’ll only get it if you defeat me.’

  Arthur lay awake all night and tried to grasp what he thought he had understood.

  They faced one another at the Club Championship. It wasn’t an important title, a single bout would decide it, there were no other competitors in their weight category, and it would actually have made more sense to award Joni the victory wreath without a fight. Arthur hadn’t beaten him in a single training session so far. There were, in fact, real bronzed oak-leaf wreaths with blue and white bows; Sally Steigrad placed a lot of value on such outward appearances, which was also why he complained about the fact that the Club still didn’t have a flag.

  Luckily no one from the family had come, even though Hinda and Zalman had offered to support him. Arthur felt as if he had been caught every time someone asked him about his new-found passion for the sport, and sometimes became really bad-tempered, as if someone were touching the open wound of his bad conscience.

  They stood facing one another on the mat, they established their holds, and Arthur’s hands trembled as they did every time he touched that body. It was a battle of wait-and-see, a clumsy dance, and soon, after hold and counterhold, their heads were quite close together, cheek to cheek, and Joni suddenly smiled his smile, a very private smile, and Arthur whispered, ‘A promise is a promise.’ Then he let himself fall in such a way that everyone would think Arthur had pulled him off his feet. The fight was over, and Arthur had defeated Joni.

  When the put the wreath on his head – ‘Completely ridiculous, such decorations!’ he had always said, and never let it go for as long as he lived – when Joni stood in front of him and shook his head, surprising victor and fair loser, he heard the words for the second time. ‘When can I have an appointment with you, Doctor?’

  It was a very ordinary consulting room, with the smell of illness and cleanliness and fear of death. The couch was narrow, so high that your legs dangled in the air if you sat on the edge, and a thick roll of paper was fastened at one end, the same rustling hygienic paper that hairdressers used for their head-rests. There was a desk in the room, an armchair behind it, a chair in front of it, a screen that concealed a clothes-stand, and a white-painted glass bookshelf in which textbooks jostled with specialist journals, and at the back in the second row, where it couldn’t be seen, Professor Hirschfeld’s Yearbook of Sexual Intermediary Stages, which Arthur scoured in vain for explanations for his own confusion. He had found only questionnaires, with which one was supposed to measure the female proportion of one’s own physicality: ‘Are your fingers pointed or blunt?’ ‘So you give off a noticeable smell in hot weather?’ ‘Do you think logically?’

  No, he wasn’t thinking logically, and it worried him, and it gave him courage, and he couldn’t wait for the day he had agreed to see Joni.

  It was a quite ordinary consulting room, but it was the most beautiful room in the world.

  Joni had been just as uncertain as he, just as curious, and afterwards just as happy and exhausted.

  Every time.

  Afterwards, which was always also a before.

  Arthur had immediately given up wrestling. He knew he couldn’t have gone on touching Joni without everyone noticing the way he was touching him. Once he had started awake from a dream in which they had met for a training session, the mat in the middle of his consulting room, onlookers had jostled all around, Sally Steigrad and Cantor Würzburger and also Uncle Salomon, even though he had died long ago, they had walked towards one another, Arthur and Joni, and Joni had thrown the curl out of his forehead, and Arthur had kissed him, he had kissed him in front of everyone, and Joni had smiled and said, ‘Oh, please, Doctor, when can I have another appointment with you?’

  ‘There’s something I have to discuss with you,’ said Joni.

  The wrong words.

  ‘It has nothing to do with you,’ said Joni, and didn’t look at him, just stared at the glass book-case, which couldn’t provide any answers either, ‘just with me, and the fact that I’m nineteen now and have to think about what happens next.’

  They had been the best years of Arthur’s life, and even before Joni went on talking he knew they were over.

  ‘I’m going into army training,’ said Joni, ‘so we won’t see each other for a long time anyway, and afterwards I may be going abroad. My uncle knows someone who has a paper factory in Linz, and there I can . . . But that’s not the reason. None of that is the reason. The reason is . . .’

  The reason is that there are no miracles.

  The reason is that one cannot be happy without being punished for it.

  ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking,’ said Joni. ‘The way you always think about things before you do them. I’ve learned a lot from you, you know. I’m grateful to you for that. Honestly: I’m grateful to you. But I’ve done a lot of thinking and reached the conclusion . . . It really has nothing to do with you.’

  Your heart is torn from your body, but it has nothing to do with you.

  ‘I have reached the conclusion . . .’ said Joni, still sitting beside Arthur, he would only have needed to reach out his hand to touch him, to hold him, never to let him go.

  But he didn’t have the right to do that.

  ‘I have reached the conclusion,’ said Joni, ‘that I’m
a perfectly ordinary person. One like all the others. Nothing special. Not like you. Just a man who wants to have a family and children and . . . yes, and a wife. The way you do.’

  The way you do.

  ‘It would also be the best thing for you. A family, I mean. You’d be a good father. A wonderful father, I’m sure of it. It’s always been lovely with you, really, it was lovely, and I’m not levelling any reproaches at you.’

  Reproaches.

  ‘But it isn’t going anywhere. You understand what I mean? It isn’t going anywhere.’

  And Arthur did the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, he did the most cowardly thing, the most contemptible, and said, ‘Yes, Joni, I understand you.’

  Joni slipped from the couch and stood in the room as much of a stranger as if he had only come here by accident on his way to a quite different destination. Arthur saw him naked, one very last time. The physique was no longer that of a boy, now it was a man, just a man, a man like many others. He walked as if he was flat-footed, his legs were slightly too short and his bottom . . .

  Gluteus maximus. Just a muscle. Which started here and here and stopped there and there and moved that and that.

  The screen was a three-part metal frame stretched with pleated beige material, and Joni disappeared behind it, as all patients did after their examination, they disappeared, you heard a rustle, and eventually they reappeared and were dressed and armoured and belonged only to themselves.

  Arthur sat on the edge of the couch for a long time. He touched the leather covering where Joni had been sitting and thought he felt a last trace of his warmth.

  45

  Joni didn’t return to the gymnastics club after military training. Neither did he go to Linz, which had just been an excuse; he now had other interests, he had broadened both inwardly and outwardly, had lost his narrow-hipped youthfulness and grown into a shape of which there were many copies in the world. Of course they met repeatedly, Zurich was small and Jewish Zurich still smaller, but Joni only had his public smile left for Arthur, he had decided not to remember the other smile. When he greeted him, he was polite and detached, a pupil meeting a teacher long after the end of his school days.

  Eventually Sally Steigrad contacted Arthur, visited him at home and brought with him two bottles of beer which they – ‘No ceremony among fellow sportsmen!’ – drank without glasses. Sally was a long, thin man, for whom the club was more important than his family. not because he didn’t have one, on the contrary, the Steigrad family comprised countless siblings and cousins, and their policies brought him, an insurance salesman, a decent income as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But policies don’t make life interesting. It was in the competitions he made his gymnasts take part in as often as possible that Sally sought excitement; in terms of his character, he said, he was a global traveller or conqueror, and he liked to complain that everything in his life was so orderly and regulated, he sometimes felt as if all he had to do before he died was tick off due dates, and no surprises of any kind were factored into his life’s plan. Although of course one always had to reckon with surprises, even unpleasant ones. And while they were on the subject: had Arthur ever thought of taking out life insurance?

  But that wasn’t what he had come about, it really wasn’t, although they should have a quiet talk about the topic another time, ‘better safe than sorry’ as the English said, and they were hardly stupid people. When Sally turned to the topic of insurance, there was something automatic about his words, a gramophone that starts singing away from wherever the needle happens to fall in the groove. As he talked, he bobbed up and down as if an over-abundant temperament wouldn’t leave him in peace for a moment, and appraised Arthur’s modest furniture like an auctioneer evaluating an inheritance. But insurance wasn’t the reason for his visit today, it really wasn’t, Sally said and sat down at last, today he didn’t want a signature from Arthur, but something quite different – to get straight to the point – he wanted to win him back to the gymnastics club.

  ‘No,’ said Arthur.

  Never again.

  ‘Not as an active member,’ Sally reassured him. Arthur had never, and he wasn’t to be offended by his frankness, been a Karl Schuhmann, he would recognise the name, only five foot six and four gold medals. Arthur’s mind, Sally had often observed, had never been entirely on the subject, ‘as if you were thinking about something other than victory’, but that was what intellectuals were like. He, Sally, imagined the medical profession as a big adventure, something that demanded the whole person, not like insurance, in which everything was already planned out and prescribed by central office. Arthur should, just by the by, think of taking out household insurance, he didn’t own much now, but the leather armchairs they were sitting in were very pretty, and if he ever got married they could ramp up the premiums.

  But back to the topic at hand. He didn’t want to bring Arthur back into the club as a wrestler, but as a doctor. It had recently become customary, and he thought it made perfect sense, to have a representative of the medical profession on the spot, mostly they were only nurses, and once, which he had found completely ridiculous, a dentist had even turned up at a wrestling competition, could Arthur imagine? if someone had dislocated a joint he would probably have reached for his drill, ha ha ha.

  Little jokes like that had helped Sally conclude many a deal.

  So, to get to the point: what did Arthur think of the idea of making himself available as the club doctor? It wouldn’t take as much time as active sport, he trained to a certain extent in his daily practice, ha ha ha, and perhaps – it didn’t have to be so, but it was a timely thought – perhaps he could occasionally give the young people a kind of course, medically correct relaxation before training, the anatomical foundations of competitive sport. Just things like that.

  To his own surprise Arthur heard himself saying ‘yes’, not ‘yes, he would think about the suggestion,’ but quite rashly and directly ‘yes’. Sally Steigrad attributed this spontaneous agreement to his own powers of persuasion and saw, once again, confirmation of his credo that arguments in the insurance trade are more important than forms.

  Arthur assumed his new duties for two reasons. On the one hand he felt a debt towards the gymnastics club, and it was part of his character always to feel most himself when he thought he was atoning for something, and on the other hand he hoped – an essay in the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Stages had led him to this thought – that regular harmless contact with young men would have an inoculating effect on him, just as a dilute pathogen protects the body against the outbreak of illness.

  And he knew that there would be no second Joni among the gymnasts, because there could never again be a second Joni.

  If it was a penance that he had taken upon himself, it was one of a not unpleasant kind. Arthur had only just celebrated his thirty-third birthday, but since Joni had ended their relationship he had aged, not exactly like Rabbi ben Ezra, who was said to have turned overnight into a dignified old man, but like someone for whom memory has become more important than the future. The young gymnasts treated him, out of respect for his profession, and indeed for or his age, with a certain distance, and he appreciated that. It was part of his character always to re-examine himself, just as there are people who turn around three times just to check that the front door is locked, and each time he did so he established, reassured and a little disappointed, that there was nothing there.

  There would never be anything there again.

  When Sally Steigrad, in the pub where they drank beer after training, started talking about the need for a club flag, whose acquisition was indispensable because one would otherwise simply make oneself ridiculous at gymnastics festivals – ‘we can’t just tie a tallis to a stick and carry it around in front of us, after all’ – Arthur voluntarily assumed the task of drumming up the money. He would, he reasoned, dedicate the flag to Joni, only in his own thoughts, of course, but they were what mattered in the end.


  He was so pleased with the idea that he didn’t even contradict Sally when he wanted to fix a date for the consecration of the flag. They agreed on 28 June of the following year, ‘which gives you nine months’, Sally said, ‘and nine months, I don’t need to explain to a doctor, is enough to create something with functioning limbs, hahaha.’ That was a joke that he liked to trot out for young married couples.

  However the self-appointed task proved almost impossible. Arthur did the rounds of Jewish businessmen, but hardly won a concrete agreement from anyone, even though he was always given a very polite welcome. People are always polite to doctors, perhaps for fear of not being treated properly should they fall ill.

  Typical of the increasingly long list of his disappointments was his visit to Siegfried Weill, the father of Désirée’s friend Esther.

  ‘Bureau’, it said on the door; the French spelling was probably supposed to upgrade the desk squeezed between the shelves to something more elevated, but it was just a store-room directly behind the shop, and the chair that Herr Weill had offered him was actually meant for salesmen, who tend to stay too long if they’re sitting comfortably.

  With his deep voice and black beard, Herr Weill looked like a licensed German rabbi. He radiated imposing dignity, which he was well aware of, and which he liked to deploy as a sales technique. He would confirm hesitant lady customers in their decisions with such a sermon-like ‘A very good choice, Madame!’ that afterwards they rarely dared to go and look elsewhere. He used a pair of ladies’ buttoned ankle-boots, chevreaux leather with patent toecaps, to explain to Arthur why – ‘to my great regret, and even though I see great value in supporting the gymnastics club as such’ – sadly, sadly he could not take part in the collection of money. ‘Look at this shoe,’ he said, and with a solemn gesture held out the open cardboard box to Arthur, ‘one of our most popular models, American in origin. On sale for eighteen francs. And now tell me, Doctor: what does this shoe cost me? If I include everything, transport, rent, wages, taxes? What does the shoe cost me?’