Melnitz

by Charles Lewinsky

  ‘But there really is something wrong with the last one,’ said Fräulein Württemberger, as if half-severed fingers and broken arms were not accidents, but merely annoying malfunctions. ‘She’s coughing blood.’ And she added in a people-are-always-causing-me-problems voice, ‘I was only told about it a few days ago.’

  ‘How long has she been here?’

  ‘Her three months are nearly up.’

  The three months were the maximum negotiated with the Swiss immigration authorities for the residence of foreign children. Gouverner, c’est prévoir: the strict limit of a quarter of a year was to prevent welcome spa guests from eventually turning into unloved immigrants. On the other hand, Switzerland was still a tourist country, and in spite of all the upheavals in Europe long might it remain one, and from the economic standpoint the powers that be had no objection to German children getting red cheeks in the healthy air of Appenzell.

  Except that in this particular case the red cheeks hadn’t happened.

  ‘She’s coughing blood? All of a sudden? And you never noticed anything before?’

  ‘I’ve had nothing but trouble with the child,’ complained Fräulein Württemberger. ‘She’s a rover.’

  ‘Has she run away?’

  ‘Such things don’t happen here. I take my caring duties very seriously.’ She checked that no strands had still escaped from her bun. ‘It’s much more unpleasant than that.’ She lowered her voice and said almost in a whisper. ‘I caught her in Köbeli’s room.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘In the room of a halfwit! In his bedroom!’ She uttered the word as furiously as if the janitor had a whole suite of rooms at his disposal, apart from his cramped bedroom.

  ‘I know Köbeli. He’s harmless.’

  ‘One can never be quite sure,’ Fräulein Württemberger said darkly. ‘Luckily he wasn’t there at the time. Which doesn’t alter the question: what would a twelve-year-old girl want in a strange man’s room?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s a quite harmless reason for it.’

  The director of the home would not be reassured so easily. ‘She was in her nightshirt,’ she said grimly. ‘So practically naked. And one knows all the things that can happen at that age.’ Fräulein Württemberger’s expression was eloquent: there are aberrations that she could not discuss with a man, even if he was a doctor. ‘And then this illness, on top of everything! When they were both supposed to go back next week.’

  ‘Both of them?’ Arthur repeated the surprising plural.

  ‘She’s here with her little brother. Irma and Moses Pollack from Kassel. Here are their certificates.’

  Every child who came to the Wartheim from abroad had to show a medical certificate before crossing the border, attesting to his or her perfect health. That was also required at a higher level, because proud as one was of the health-giving properties of good Swiss air, one didn’t want sick people coming into the country. A tourist country cannot afford plagues.

  A Privatdozent, Dr Saul Merzbach (before his specialisation, ‘consultant in gynaecology at the Red Cross Hospital, Kassel’ the word ‘former’ had been added in ink) had confirmed that he had carried out a thorough examination, including nasal smear for diphtheria bacilli on the siblings Pollack, Irma (twelve years old) and Moses (nine years old), and found no signs of illness in either the physical or the mental spheres. That had been three months ago.

  But now Irma was coughing blood.

  ‘And her brother?’

  ‘Completely healthy. Now he’s clinging to his sister far too much. I’ve tried to separate the two of them. To encourage his independence. But there were scenes . . .’

  Children can be so unreasonable.

  ‘Then I’ll take a look at Irma.’

  Both children came in, hand in hand. Arthur would have guessed that the little girl was younger, perhaps ten, eleven at the most. She was small for her age, but had a rather adult face with big brown eyes and a slight squint. Her wandering gaze made her look as if she were constantly lost in thought and her attention were elsewhere. She didn’t look ill.

  Moses wasn’t much smaller than his sister, but he looked up at her so trustingly, and she held his hand so protectively that one couldn’t help thinking of a mother with her child.

  ‘So you’re Irma,’ said Arthur. ‘And you’re little Moishi.’

  ‘My name is Moses,’ the boy corrected the diminutive. He had a very small voice, as if he had brought only part of himself from Germany and left the rest behind there. ‘The name comes from Moses Mendelssohn.’

  ‘And do you know who Moses Mendelssohn was?’

  ‘Not exactly. A musician, I think. But my father said it’s a name you can be proud of.’

  ‘Your father is quite right. Do you write to him regularly?’

  ‘We can’t write to him,’ said the girl. ‘He’s dead.’

  Arthur wanted to bite off his tongue.

  Fräulein Württemberger had no time for such useless chitchat. ‘There’s no need for any of this. Tell the doctor what’s wrong with you.’

  ‘I have no cough. It hurts, in here.’ She put her hand to her chest. ‘And sometimes there’s blood.’

  ‘Show the doctor!’

  With her free hand, and without letting go of her brother, Irma reached into the pocket of her black-and-white checked apron, took out a crumpled handkerchief and held it out to Arthur. A big blood-stain had dried dark brown into the fabric.

  ‘Sure enough,’ said Arthur.

  He held out the handkerchief to Fräulein Württemberger, but she stepped quickly back, startled and repelled.

  ‘The doctor in Kassel should have noticed that,’ she groused, and patrolled her bun once more for escaping tendrils. ‘Such things don’t just happen from one day to the next.’

  ‘Sometimes they do.’

  Fräulein Württemberger held out her index finger with the chewed fingernail to the little girl in an accusatory fashion and snapped, ‘I hold you responsible! You should have told me this much sooner.’ And in a no less reproachful voice to Arthur, ‘What sort of illness is it? I hope it’s nothing infectious?’

  Arthur was a mild-mannered person, far too mild-mannered, as Hinda was always reminding him. But enough was enough. ‘It may not have escaped even you,’ he said sarcastically, ‘that doctors sometimes examine their patients before making their diagnosis. And now please leave me alone with the child.’

  ‘I insist that . . .’

  ‘As you wish.’ Arthur put the stethoscope that had already taken out back in its case and snapped the lock shut. ‘Then I will finish my work now and inform the Women’s Association that here in the Wartheim we may have a case of a highly infectious pulmonary disease.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Establishing who bears responsibility for such an epidemic will no longer be my concern.’

  Once her bastion of polysyllabic words and unquestioned articles of faith had been penetrated, Fräulein Württemberger had little left to throw into the battle. She practically tore Moses away from his sister and marched outside with him, pulling the boy behind her like a prisoner of war.

  The door slammed shut. Irma was about to run after her brother, but then stayed put.

  ‘If she isn’t nice to him,’ Arthur said consolingly, ‘I will give her some medicine to make her have a sore tummy for three days.’

  Perhaps little Irma didn’t understand his joke. Arthur liked children, but he wasn’t used to dealing with them very much. The little girl just looked at him with big eyes, or rather, she looked past him and asked, ‘Shall I get undressed? So that you can examine me?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Let’s have a look at your chest.’

  Most people, even children, turned away when they took off their clothes for an examination, hid for a few seconds the nakedness that she was about to present to the doctor. Irma didn’t. On the contrary: she looked at him as concentratedly as if she wanted to find something out from him, or solve a riddle that invo
lved him.

  ‘You can’t see from outside,’ she said, as she folded her apron and laid it in a laundry basket. ‘But when I cough it hurts quite badly.’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ came the voice from under the pullover that she was just pulling over her head.

  ‘And how frequent are these attacks?’

  ‘Sometimes every day and sometimes . . . It always comes as a surprise.’

  She put her vest carefully in the basket as well, and stood in front of him wearing only a pair of white panties and grey hand-knitted socks.

  This was not a sick child. Perhaps a little undernourished, with excessively prominent collar-bones, but otherwise . . . Her skin was rosy and by no means cyanotic.

  But when she coughed she spat blood.

  From the courtyard came the sound of children playing and the voice of Fräulein Württemberger demanding that they be quiet.

  The girl was not tubercular, he would have bet his medical certificate on it. He examined her thoroughly, according to all the rules of the discipline, and found not the slightest symptom of any illness. In percussion the sound was sonorous, and in auscultation there was neither a rattle nor a buzz. He had her whisper ‘sixty-six’ strictly according to the textbook, something he had not done since training at the university hospital, and then say ‘ninety-nine’ in a deep voice. It all sounded exactly as it was supposed to sound. In the notes that he filled in for every Women’s Association child, he used the abbreviation n.n.s.

  No noticeable symptom.

  But her handkerchief was full of blood.

  He made her turn away from him and applied the stethoscope again, this time to her back.

  ‘Please cough.’

  She coughed violently and put her hand to her chest.

  ‘Is there blood again?’

  She held her hand in front of her mouth, spat into the palm and held it out to him. ‘Not this time.’ Then she rubbed her hand on her pants, pulled a face and added, ‘But it hurts.’

  ‘When you cough?’

  ‘It hurts a lot.’

  Where she had rubbed her hand dry there was something red on the seam of her pants. Not blood, as Arthur thought for a moment, but the red stitching of a laundry mark: ‘I.P.’ for Irma Pollack. They were keen on order here in the Wartheim.

  Outside the children squealed with delight as they played. The ironing room smelled of soap flakes and damp.

  ‘Can I get dressed again?’ asked Irma.

  ‘One moment. When blood comes when you cough – what colour is the blood?’

  The two diverging eyes looked at him in surprise. ‘Like blood. Red.’

  ‘How exactly?’

  ‘Just normal dark red. I don’t know what you want to know.’

  ‘I only want to know one thing from you, Irma,’ said Arthur. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Just one little thing. Why are you lying to me?’

  59

  ‘But it is real blood,’ she said.

  She had tried everything, she had coughed for him and bowed her back as if the pain was unbearable, she had described how sometimes in the night she couldn’t breathe at all, and had to open the window wide, and the other girls in the dormitory had complained about the draught, he could ask them, she had, as he went on merely shaking his head, resorted to childish defiance, stamped her foot and declared that she had a very special form of tuberculosis, a kind that you couldn’t spot just with a bit of knocking and listening, she had, when none of that did any good, shaken out her encrusted handkerchief and held it up in front of his eyes, ‘Blood, real blood, can’t you see?’ She had tried everything.

  But she hadn’t cried.

  ‘You should get dressed again,’ said Arthur. ‘We don’t want you catching a cold.’

  At the end of an examination there is always that embarrassing moment when patients are no longer impersonal actors of their illness, but are once again themselves, and hence no longer just undressed, but naked. Irma too suddenly folded her thin arms over her little-girl chest and turned away. It was a sign of submission. She had done her best, but now she was admitting defeat.

  Only when she had put on her vest again did she ask, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It was the wrong sort of blood.’

  ‘It was real blood,’ she protested.

  ‘Let me explain,’ said Arthur, and at that moment, as so often, he wished he had experienced children of his own. ‘If someone coughs blood, you see, and if that blood comes out of the lungs, as it does in tuberculosis, for example, it’s always bright red. And slightly foamy. You have to imagine, as if someone had stirred in a little pinch of sherbet powder. But on your handkerchief . . .’

  ‘It’s real blood!’ As if she just had to repeat it often enough to convince him.

  ‘I realise that. Where did you get it?’

  She looked cautiously around, even though they were alone in the ironing room and no one could see in through the window, and lifted the leg of her pants a little. On the inside of her thin thigh was a whole series of scars, one beside the other.

  ‘Fräulein Württemberger always checks to see if we’re clean,’ Irma explained. ‘But we have to keep our pants on, even under our night-shirts. That was why I cut myself there and then held the handkerchief to it.’ A quick smile spread across her face. She was also a little girl whose attempt to trick the adult world had nearly worked.

  ‘Where did you get the knife?’ Arthur asked.

  ‘I stole a razor blade from Köbeli’s room.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘No,’ said Irma. ‘You don’t understand at all.’

  Then they were sitting side by side on the ironing board. For confessions, Arthur had learned in the past, it’s good to sit side by side; you’re close to the other person and don’t have to look him in the eye.

  It was a long story that she told him, and when he remembered it later he could still smell soap flakes and damp sheets and the smell of cleanly washed children’s hair.

  Irma’s story began with all Jewish organisations in Germany being dissolved, which was why from one day to the next Irma’s mother had no work and nowhere to live. No, in fact, it had actually started earlier than that.

  With the accident.

  ‘He slipped,’ said Irma, ‘he just slipped like that, he didn’t even fall over, Mama says. She was there. He just stumbled, from the pavement into the street, and then there was this lorry coming along.’

  She told of the death of her father without shedding a tear, she had probably decided once and for all not to cry, at least not here in Heiden, where she was responsible for her little brother and had to be strong.

  It was five years since that accident now, she had been seven at the time and Moses only four. ‘He doesn’t remember anything about it, not really, but we tell him about his father, Mama and I, over and over again, and then it’s as if he can remember it all himself.’

  She always talked about ‘his father’ and ‘my father’, she never said ‘Papa’. She had built a lot of walls for herself, to shelter behind and find her way along.

  ‘Then Mama found a job, in the B’nai B’rith old people’s home. Do you know what B’nai B’rith is?’

  Yes, Arthur knew what B’nai B’rith was. He was even a member of that charitable organisation himself.

  ‘We lived there too. Up in the attic. Before, it had been a room for the maids. With very crooked walls. Mama said, “The old flat’s far too big for us, now that there’s only the three of us.” But I think she just couldn’t pay the rent any more.’

  ‘You must have been very sad.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Irma, ‘in fact it was quite fun in the new place at first.’

  She said it bravely, as she had probably often said it to console her mother. Clever children knew that high spirits are expected of them, and when they have to grow up prematurely they know that best of all.

  ‘Then the Nazis closed the hom
e, from one day to the next. They just sent the old people away. And some of them, Mama said, had paid a lot of money to be able to live there forever. Mama says there’s nothing to be done about it. But it’s all wrong. Do you understand that?’

  You can’t explain everything you understand to a child. The German authorities, not long ago, had banned the B’nai B’rith and confiscated all its property. Where the sick had once been tended or orphans raised, various Nazi organisations now resided. Strength through joy.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t really understand it either.’

  Irma nodded, she hadn’t expected anything else, and went on telling her story. ‘Then we moved in with Uncle Paul, but he’s only got one room for the three of us, and we always have to be quiet and aren’t allowed to disturb him. He has a nervous heart, and noise is very bad for that. So Mama said it would be good for me to go to Switzerland for three months. So that she can get on with looking for work and a new place to stay. I said a trip like that would be far too expensive, but Mama said we’d been invited and it wouldn’t cost anything at all.’

  Probably, Arthur thought, someone from the forbidden B’nai B’rith had written to the Augustin Keller Lodge, the sister lodge in Zurich, and asked for help. That lodge actually owned the Wartheim, it had been bought with donated money and placed at the disposal of the Women’s Associations for free.

  ‘And now we’re to move back to Kassel, but . . .’

  But . . .

  She sat beside him, quite still. Only her feet played with each other as if they had nothing to do with the rest of her body.

  But . . .

  She made a decision and slipped down from the table. She went and stood in front of Arthur, her hands clasped behind her back. She had to throw back her head to look up at him.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ she said. She looked him in the eyes and past him at the same time.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Dr Merzbach, who used to bring the children into the world at the hospital, and isn’t allowed to do that any more, he told me that all doctors have to take a great oath not to give away people’s secrets.’