Only then had he done what he should have done long ago: applied the handbrake. He had climbed down from the box and tended to the horses. They were sweat-drenched and steaming and were foaming at the mouth, but they hadn’t been hurt – Lampertz would have killed him! – none of them was limping, and eventually, when his heart had stopped thumping quite so hard, Hillel was able to drive on, right onto the Rudolf Brun Bridge, left onto the Limmatquai and then uphill to Schaffhauserplatz and back to the Strickhof.
There, alerted by telephone, Herr Gerster was already waiting for them, gave them an initial earful and then, as they were rubbing the horses dry, walked impatiently up and down, firmly resolved to give them the mother of all bollockings, which they would never forget as long as they lived.
‘Sons of bitches blithering bloody idiots!’ yelled the headmaster. ‘Why did you drive down there?’
‘No reason,’ said Hillel.
That story would be told for a long time to come, thought Gerster. You would have to be a dashed good horseman to come out of a hussar’s trick like that unharmed. He went on swearing a little longer, as his office decreed, but he was only doing it automatically now, and even looking at his watch.
The punishment he was giving them was a harmless one, just as thunder and lightning sometimes crashes like mad until you think the whole harvest is lost, and then there’s only a little shower of rain. They were to sort out the milk-cart, straight away. The scratches would have to be painted over where it had scraped along the wall, and they would have to do that together, to learn that camaraderie was the name of the game here at the Strickhof – ‘camaraderie, damn it all!’ – and if anything, the slightest thing, reached his ears, he would tear their heads off with his own bare hands.
He said again, ‘Sons of bitches bloody blithering stupid idiots!’, left them standing there and went back to his plum tart.
When the door slammed shut behind Gerster, Böhni was still standing to attention. Hillel turned to him and said, ‘Amod no’ach!’ He grinned when Böhni looked at him uncomprehendingly. In the Hashomer Haza’ir, the Zionist youth association, they liked to put on military airs, and that was the command when you were allowed to stand at ease at mifkad, or muster.
‘But you’ll paint the box,’ said Böhni.
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s all your fault.’
‘Camaraderie, Walter! Have you forgotten? Camaraderie is quite the thing at the Strickhof, damn it all!’ Hillel was so drunk on all the excitement and its happy outcome that he was even copying Gerstli.
The cart was already outside on the gravel, and that was quite sensible. Mending scratches is delicate work, and done better by daylight.
In the shed there were two brushes and a tin of green paint.
Kudi Lampertz had arrived quite unexpectedly; the headmaster had probably alerted him by telephone. Now he behaved as if he were only briefly interrupting his Sunday stroll, and watched their work with his hands propped on his hips. ‘The farmer works with his hands, not his mouth,’ was one of his favourite sayings, so Böhni and Rosenthal only went on arguing very quietly.
‘You’re a prick,’ whispered Böhni.
‘You know all about pricks,’ Hillel whispered back.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Looking at your shirt . . .’
‘I can wear whatever I like.’
‘You know why Fröntler shirts are such a dirty grey colour? Because character shows through.’
Böhni would have liked to floor him with a quicker answer, but none came to mind. ‘They’re going to beat the crap out of you,’ he whispered instead.
First they’ll have to find out who it was.’
‘Somebody might tell them.’
‘Are you going to be the snitch?’
Böhni didn’t reply, just assumed a devious expression that was supposed to mean: Jews always thought they were the only clever ones, but other people were just as good at settling scores.
‘Is that your plan?’
‘And if it was?’
‘I’d have to have a word with my uncle.’
‘Eh?’
‘He’s a famous wrestler. In the Jewish gymnastics association. Have you never heard of Arthur Meijer? If he and his troop turn up, you’ll be picking up your bones one at a time.’
‘Never put anything past the Jews,’ thought Böhni, that was what Rolf Henne always said in the Front. They might have some kind of secret fighting troop that you had to keep an eye out for. Why else would Rosenthal be grinning in spite of the threat of a good Swiss kicking? He couldn’t have known that Hillel was only amusing himself with the idea of his peaceful, short-sighted uncle as a dangerous street-fighter.
Walter Böhni wasn’t a bad person. Having grown up on a little farm near Flaach, in the middle of wine country, he had had to work hard even as a child, particularly in the spring, when the nobs in the city wanted their asparagus and people in the country had to break their backs to pick it. For him, agricultural college was a great chance to get on in life and amount to something, so he couldn’t stand people like Rosenthal, who only ever did things on a whim and didn’t really need to. He wanted to go to Palestine and farm there, he had said on the first day of school when they were all supposed to explain what they expected of the Strickhof. And everyone knew that there was nothing in Palestine but desert and bogs and nothing to farm at all.
Böhni’s parents had always worked hard, they’d grafted, and often didn’t know where they would get the next bit of meat to go with their potatoes. It wasn’t fair, and Böhni, who was also a thinker in his way, had been grateful when someone had given him an explanation for it. The Jews were to blame, with their department stores and banks, whose sole purpose was to suck the common man dry and keep him in his place. He hadn’t joined the National Front himself, you had to go to too many meetings and marches, but he read their paper regularly, and thought everything in it made perfect sense. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing if the comrades were kept informed about what the Jews were planning.
So he whispered, ‘What sort of house is that, in fact, on Fortunagasse?’
‘It’s full of people who want exactly what your friends are demanding so noisily: to get out of Switzerland as quickly as possible.’
‘To Poland?’
‘Much further East.’
‘So why did they even . . .?’
He fell silent, because Lampertz was coming closer. Normally Lampertz was more of a ramrod-straight marcher, but now he strolled over in an exaggeratedly relaxed manner, to stress that it was really, really just by chance that he had happened to drop in here at the Strickhof on his day off.
‘Do you think the paint’s all right like that, or does it need another coat?’ asked Hillel.
‘Two at least. No bodging here.’ He stood beside them for a moment and then said, ‘Did you actually drive down those steps with a team of horses?’
‘I’m sorry, Herr Lampertz.’
‘And rightly so. But I’d have to say: well done! I wouldn’t have thought you capable of it. Not even you would have managed that one, Böhni.’
57
Zalman Kamionker had come to his clothes factory like the Virgin to the Child or, to use his own simile, like the patriarch Abraham to his son Isaac, at an age when such a change in his life was no longer to be expected. His work with the Relief Committee for refugees from Galicia had forced him to become a labour broker, which had at first, during the Great War, not been a very difficult job for an experienced negotiator. Active service and the border watch meant that there was a universal shortage of manpower, and anyone who was willing to put in a bit of elbow grease was welcome. Over time, the committee gradually started falling asleep. It only became active occasionally, when there was acute emergency, and took account of its meagre holdings once a year, a task that Frau Okun was more than capable of doing all on her own. Then, in the economic crisis of the early 1930s, unemployment started rising faster and
faster, and the committee had to be reactivated. The crisis was a particularly serious blow to the Eastern Jews, whose origins could still clearly be heard and who, to be honest, were not held in particularly great esteem by Swiss Jews of long standing. These refugees, who had in fact become relatively well acclimatised in Switzerland, had suddenly reverted to being foreign scoundrels, who were overrunning the country and taking away the few remaining jobs. When people were fired, they were the first to go, and then who did they go to with their problems? To Zalman, of course, and he didn’t send them away, even though Hinda observed tartly that his readiness to help others had also cost him his own parnassah. He approached all kinds of people for work, and because there was none to be found, he decided to create some.
As he had once done in his time in the Golden Medina, he did the rounds of the department stores and offered to supply the buyers with off-the-peg clothes, exactly according to their wishes and cheaper than any other suppliers. He just wanted to create a bit of employment at a time when people were already standing on street corners holding cardboard signs, hawking themselves around as a shmattes dealer would hawk an old pair of trousers. If someone had told him it would make him the balebos of his own company, he would have told them he was meshuga. Zalman Kamionker as a capitalist? You might as soon have had Joseph Goebbels as a minyan man.
The first order came from François, whose department store had run out of warm coats after a sudden cold spell in the spring. The order, François made a point of stressing, had nothing at all to do with charity, what would someone baptised be doing supporting Jewish refugees? He was a businessman, and in business neither Jewish charity nor Christian love of one’s fellow man had any place. If the coats delivered were not the very best quality, Zalman was never to show his face there again, was that clear? But he did place the order.
That was how it began.
In the first year he employed people as the work came in, by the day or even by the hour. They each worked at home, practically operating the sewing machine with one foot and rocking the cradle with the other. As they were all sewing for dear life, the working day could sometimes last fourteen hours or even more. Zalman often felt like an exploiter, Zalman of all people, the trade unionist who had been foremost in fighting for a forty-eight hour week in the 1918 General Strike, and who had, of course, therefore promptly lost his job. At first they delivered only coats – Zalman was very well acquainted with those from his time in America – and they were later joined by dresses and dressing gowns, and soon the KK monogram appeared on every item of monogrammed clothing. KK was actually supposed to stand for Konfektion Kamionker – Konfektion meaning ‘ready-made’ – but the workers had their own understanding of the letters. For them KK meant, quite simply: Koschere Kleiderfabrik – kosher clothes factory.
Strangely enough, the final breakthrough came via the customs of a continent far away. A German refugee, the former owner of a fashion shop in Magdeburg, had by chance been given a visa to move to Kenya, where there was an apparently limitless need for cotton clothes of size 50 and up, with brightly coloured polka-dot fabrics most in demand. When, because of bureaucratic difficulties, the man was stuck in Zurich for a few weeks before travelling back to Kenya, Zalman’s committee had supported him – it had stopped restricting its charity only to Galicians long ago – and out of gratitude he now remembered the kosher clothes factory. There were more and more repeat orders, which enabled KK to rent its own business properties in Wollishofen, and take on its first permanent staff.
At first Zalman didn’t work for the company himself, or else did his work unpaid. Even though he regularly fought with his employers, he had always managed to find a job, and he wouldn’t have thought of taking someone else’s job away from him. But the more successful the business became, the harder it was to run it casually and just as an act of kindness, and eventually Zalman had had to come to terms with the fact that he was now the company director whether he liked it or not. To remain true to his principles in at least one respect, at first he wanted to pay himself no more than he paid one of his cutters, but then Hinda, who never normally got involved in his job, had made a terrible fuss. Did he really think he would get a better seat in Gan Eden, she demanded to know, if he was satisfied with seventy rappen an hour, and would he please explain to her how such starvation wages were to pay for the suits and the good shirts that his new role would demand of him. That was almost the worst thing for Zalman: he would now have to put on a tie every day, because he would be dealing with customers all the time. He was a peaceful man, but it made him furious every time.
The argument that convinced him in the end was the fact that Rachel was working in the factory as well. There was no possible reason why Zalman, who worked his back off for the company around the clock should not earn more than his daughter, who as office manager did nothing but sit on her tochus and order people around.
Meanwhile he had got quite used to being the Herr Direktor. The kosher clothes factory was a recognised business, they worked on Deutschland brand central bobbin sewing machines, and used electric irons with regulating switches. But what was much more important: they provided work for almost thirty people. The staff register included a ‘directrice’ for the designs, fourteen stitchers, six cutters, four ironers, three people in the office, an apprentice, a travelling salesman and their own model. Only two employees were not Jewish: the directrice, one Fräulein Bodmer, who visited all the fashion shows so that their designs very quickly followed current trends, and the mannequin, a tearful peroxide blonde called Blandine Flückiger, who set a great deal of store by her sensitive soul and had to be consoled almost every day over some slight or other.
Rachel, who ruled the office with an iron hand, regularly argued with her, just as she had argued with her two predecessors. She was not at all happy with the idea of a silly trollop of just twenty-four being sweet-talked by all the men just because she had a cute punim and was a size 38. And besides, Rachel was almost sure of it, there was something going on between Blandine and Joni Leibowitz, the travelling salesman. By now the KK’s clientele stretched as far as St Gallen, Bern and Basle, and everywhere the buyers wanted to have the new designs presented on the living model. Joni Leibowitz and she often travelled alone together in the car, and everybody knew what models were like.
The deeper reason for her animosity lay in the fact that Rachel, so many years ago that it wasn’t true, had herself once taken an interest in Joni Leibowitz. Back in the war, and before he drank himself a little petit-bourgeois belly, he had been a handsome man in his uniform, a stationery representative by profession; only later had he switched to the shmattes profession. In those days he had in fact danced attendance to Désirée, but because no one had had a sensible word out of her since Alfred’s death, he slowly lost interest in her and her grocer’s shop and started looking elsewhere. Rachel and he had gone dancing together a few times, and once – God knows, one had been young and stupid – she had let him kiss her, and he had immediately tried to put his hand under her blouse. Which she hadn’t let him do, she hadn’t been as young and stupid as that even when she was in nappies.
With each year that she herself remained single, Rachel found more and more fault in married and attractive women.
She herself had nothing more exciting to do than go to the office every day, which was why she claimed to do it entirely out of conviction. ‘We live in the twentieth century; there’s no room for fashion plates and old biddies.’ She still had her flaming red hair, even though she had to touch it up discreetly with henna every month, and still wore the smartest dresses from the KK collection, ‘not out of vanity, as a working woman such a thing would be completely alien to me, but because in the end I have to represent the company.’ When visitors came into the shop, this representation assumed two completely different forms. She received buyers with a kind of tomboyish chumminess, and preceded each sentence with the unspoken introduction: ‘Among us business people . . .’ Towards jo
b-seekers and other supplicants she was off-puttingly severe, although this was a bitter necessity. Zalman in his generosity was something of a pushover, and often she had had to say to him, ‘If it was up to you, we’d employ every shnorrer who walked in off the street, and the company would be mechullah in a year.’
The man who was standing in front of her was just such a one. She didn’t like his manner. He had studied her keenly for a moment, she sensed something like that, and now he was making an uninterested face as if it wasn’t worth looking at her any more closely. Stood there as if rooted to the spot, hat in hand, and didn’t move even when she kept him waiting and then took a phone call and then another. Not once did he so much as shift the weight of his body from one foot to the other. This was someone who had learned to wait, one of those patient people who are particularly annoying because you can’t get rid of them again so easily.
‘And you want . . .?’ Rachel had to ask at last.
‘Work.’
He said it as one delivers a military report, not one syllable too many or too few. He was a German, ‘a Berliner’, thought Rachel, who didn’t know much about dialects, but for whom everything that sounded unpleasantly Teutonic came from Berlin. His voice was surprisingly loud. Usually if people wanted something they were rather timid. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ the tone of their voice meant, ‘but if it isn’t too much trouble, I have something to ask you for.’
He wasn’t someone who asked. If he bothered someone, than he bothered them.
‘Are you a tailor?’ asked Rachel, although of course she knew he wasn’t. You could see that. His suit was cut for a much fatter man, and really hung off him; an expert, if he had had to make do with cast-off clothes, would have made it much smaller, so that it fit.
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