‘He was prancing around in front of the girl. He wants to get her into bed, and he hasn’t managed it yet.’
‘How do you know that?’ Rachel cut in.
‘You can see,’ said Herr Grün. ‘And you can hardly blame him either, she’s a pretty girl. And it’s none of my business.’
‘And still you . . .?’
Herr Grün talked calmly on, as if they weren’t all standing impatiently around him
‘He was trying to impress her with his chochme, he wanted to show her what a clever person he is, and how much he knows about the world of politics. They talked about what was happening in Germany, and he declared that nothing like that would ever happen to him personally. He always got on famously with all non-Jews, even if they sympathised with the Front or thought Hitler was a great statesman. Because he was adaptable, unlike lots of other people, because he didn’t attract attention and he wasn’t stand-offish.
‘Lots of Jews, he told her, still didn’t understand that, and if someone was bullied or put in the camps, it was always partly his own fault. “His own fault,” he said. So I picked up the iron and hit him over the head with it.’
Zalman walked over to him and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘I would be grateful, Herr Grün,’ he said, ‘if next time you settled for an object that wasn’t quite so hard.’
‘Next time?’ asked Rachel, furiously.
‘I can’t sack him for that,’ said Zalman.
62
‘Just ask him!’
Always the same answer, however much Rachel might have urged her father. ‘Ask him! If he wants to tell you, he’ll tell you.’ And Hinda, who must have been let in on the secret, was no help either.
Of course there was an official version. There was always an official version.
It had been an accident, they had told everyone in the shop, an unfortunate slip, a stumble, whatever. Admittedly no one was really convinced by that, but what Blandine Flückiger was going around saying was even less credible. Herr Grün had quite deliberately picked up the iron, she claimed in all seriousness, and simply lashed out with it. ‘Impossible,’ people said. She was known to play the tormented victim, and to over-dramatise her not particularly interesting life.
If someone doesn’t know the truth, he creates one for himself, so in the kosher clothes factory they agreed that it must have been a story of jealousy. Two men, no longer in the first flush of youth, fighting tooth and nail over a peroxide Jean Harlow – it was a good story, so it was the one that people chose to believe.
Neither of them wanted to say anything about what happened, and their persistent silence was generally seen as a confirmation of the legend. That night Zalman had gone with Joni Leibowitz to Arthur’s surgery, and used the opportunity to press him to be silent – Rachel didn’t know what arguments he had used. Just two days later Joni had turned up for work again, with a fat bandage around his head, on which his hat sat two sizes too small. He batted away the jokes of the buyers with the same, unchanging joke: ‘Ok, I fell on my head – but that doesn’t mean you can push my prices down!’
Herr Grün got on with his work for a few more days as if nothing had happened; he had just become even more taciturn, he said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Goodbye’ and otherwise didn’t talk to anybody. Every time Blandine Flückiger saw him, she took cover behind someone with a shrill cry, to which Herr Grün responded with a smile, or with a facial expression that must once have been a smile.
‘Ask him!’ was all that Rachel heard each time she tried to find out, but of course she wouldn’t have dreamt of asking Herr Grün. How could she have?
But then, a few days later, he was no longer sitting at his sewing machine, and his landlady, Frau Posmanik, informed them that he had a high fever, and there was no way of telling when he might recover. So it fell to Rachel to look after him. If you’re responsible for the staff in a company and you fill the pay packets, you have a certain duty of care.
‘And you can use the opportunity to ask a few questions,’ mocked Zalman.
Rachel had not, as she replied in a dignified voice, even thought of such a thing. She was just doing her duty. So in the evening she dutifully took the money for a fortifying bottle of tonic wine from petty cash and set off.
The Posmaniks lived on Molkenstrasse, right behind the barracks’ parade ground, in one of those cheaply built rental blocks that look derelict while they’re still new. Five people crammed themselves into three small rooms, and they’d had to rent out one of those. Herr Posmanik spent his days looking for work, which in practice meant that he boosted himself for the task with his first beer in the morning, and consoled himself for his lack of success with the last schnapps in the evening. His wife kept the family afloat by taking little scraps of brocade, which she begged from Zalman, among others, embroidering them with gold thread and then selling these coasters from door to door among the Jewish houses. Her products were neither useful nor really decorative, but people felt sorry for this sickly woman – ‘Her skin is like blue milk,’ Hinda had once said – and always bought something from her. In Zurich you almost had the impression that a Jewish flat without a brocade coaster was just as incomplete as one without a mezuzah on the door post.
The sound of children shouting could be heard from the top-floor flat. At first Rachel knocked politely, but in the end she had to hammer on the door with her fist to be heard at all. The shouting died down, she heard whispering and then at last the door opened, at least as far as the security chain on the door permitted. A little boy, stark naked, eyed her suspiciously through the chink. ‘We’re not buying anything,’ he said, a phrase that he had probably often heard his mother say on similar occasions, and thought was a correct form of greeting.
‘I’m Frau Kamionker,’ said Rachel in her best aunty voice. ‘I’ve come to visit.’
‘There’s no one at home,’ said the little boy, and was about to shut the door again. Rachel was just able to wedge her foot in it.
‘Your lodger is at home. Herr Grün.’
When he heard the name, the little boy beamed. ‘He’s such a funny man,’ he said. And then, suddenly serious, ‘But now he’s sick.’
A funny man? ‘Funny’ wasn’t really a word that seemed to apply to Herr Grün.
‘Shall I tell you a poem?’ asked the little boy.
‘What?’
‘A poem. Uncle Grün taught me it.’
‘Won’t you let me in first?’
‘No, first the poem,’ he said, as seriously as if in polite circles such a recitation was one of the most natural preliminaries to visit.
‘Off you go, then.’
The naked boy in the crack of the door took a deep breath and recited in one breath: ‘My parrot won’t eat carrots, he thinks they’re rather grim, he’s the loveliest of parrots, but carrots aren’t for him.’
‘That’s a song,’ said Rachel.
‘Only if you sing it,’ the little boy replied and went on, ‘He’s wild about cough sweets and biscuits, and celery keeps him trim, he’s been known to try an oyster, but carrots aren’t for him. Do you know what cough sweets are?’
‘They’re sweet things that you eat when you have a cold.’
‘Have you got any for him?’ asked the little boy. ‘I think Uncle Grün has a cold.’
‘Does he teach you lots of poems like that?’
‘He knows at least a million,’ said the little boy. ‘Or even more.’
‘How lovely.’ Rachel was feeling more and more ridiculous standing outside the half-closed door to the flat. ‘But will you please open up for me now?’
The boy thought for a minute, even raised his hand as if to say, ‘Don’t bother me when I’m thinking,’ and then nodded. ‘All right, then.’
To open up, he first had to close the door again and then, to judge by the rattle and clatter on the other side, he had trouble unhooking the chain. But then it was done; Rachel was finally able to make her visit. When she stepped inside the flat, two
even smaller children looked at her curiously.
‘I’d like to have a parrot as well,’ said the boy, and walked straight ahead of her, stark naked as he was. ‘If he doesn’t want the carrots, I’ll eat them myself.’
Herr Grün’s room was tiny. A bed, a wardrobe, a chair. There was no room for a table; the window sill had to serve as a substitute.
‘Herr Grün?’
No reply. Just a strange sound, like someone drumming nervously on a glass with their fingernails.
The room smelled of illness. You didn’t need to be a doctor to recognise that.
It wasn’t fingernails. It was teeth. Clattering teeth.
He was in bed. The day was warm, almost summery, but Herr Grün’s teeth were chattering. He had laid a coat over the thin blue bedcover and crept under both, had drawn up his legs like a baby, his arms wrapped protectively around his body, and still he was shivering.
‘Herr Grün!’
When he heard his name he tried to sit up, tried to say something, but didn’t have the strength. The breath whistled out of his throat. Deep inside him a door was open, a window was broken. He moved his lips and couldn’t put the syllables together. He tried again and again and again.
Rachel bent down to him. He smelled unpleasant, as sick people do.
A number. He was trying to force out a number.
‘Four thousand eight hundred and ninety-two,’ whispered Herr Grün.
A thread of saliva ran from his mouth. Even though Rachel was repelled by it, she wiped it away with a corner of the sheet.
A shabby, worn, pauper’s sheet. Far too thin for a sick man.
When she asked the naked little boy about a telephone, he looked at her as if she’d asked him for something unheard-of, something from a fairy-tale, a lump of gold or a parrot.
‘No one in the building has a telephone,’ he said.
‘And where does your mother go when she needs to call somebody?’
‘Who would I want to call?’ Frau Posmanik had come home, from a journey, one might have thought, because she was holding a big suitcase in her hand, covered with faded souvenir stickers from expensive hotels, St Moritz, Carlsbad, Nice. Someone had given her the old thing out of pity, and since then she had been carting her collection of useless brocade coasters around the city in it.
‘What an honour, Frau Kamionker,’ she said. Anyone who depends on the sympathy of others to earn a living develops fine antennae, so she knew that Rachel didn’t like being addressed as Fräulein. ‘I had no idea – Aaron, put your trousers on immediately! – no idea that you were going to come and visit . . .’
‘My trousers are wet,’ wailed the little boy.
‘You’ll have to forgive me, Frau Kamionker. I had to wash them, and they’re the only ones he’s got.’
‘That doesn’t matter. I’m here for Herr Grün.’
‘He really can’t come to work,’ said Frau Posmanik, and forgot to set down her suitcase, she was so eager to stand up for her lodger. ‘He tried to get up, but he just couldn’t.’ Because of her life’s experience, she could only imagine that Rachel had come on a punitive mission.
‘The man is seriously ill!’
‘Why didn’t you bring cough sweets?’ the little boy asked and immediately started reciting again, ‘He’s wild about cough sweets and biscuits . . .’
‘Sha!’
‘Herr Grün needs a doctor.’
‘I’ve done what I could,’ Frau Posmanik defended herself. ‘I made him some tea but he wouldn’t drink it, and I can’t spend all day . . .’
‘Is there a telephone anywhere around here?’
‘Only at the Kreuel in Kanonengasse. It’s a pub. But you’re better off not going there. It’s not a place for . . .’
‘For our people,’ she had wanted to say, but then she choked the words back. It would have struck her as presumptuous to put herself on the same level as the daughter of Herr Kamionker the factory owner. Although the people in the Kreuel wouldn’t have distinguished between them, and would have treated them both with equal rudeness. ‘It’s the Frontists’ pub.’
‘Kreuel,’ Rachel repeated. ‘Good. Perhaps in the meantime you can find something to wrap him up in.’ And was already out the door, with a competent efficiency unfamiliar in this household.
Frau Posmanik was already holding her suitcase, with all the stuck-on memories that weren’t hers.
When Rachel came home at last that night, back to the safety of her own flat, she stood in front of the mirror for a long time.
She just couldn’t get it. There was nothing unusual about her. She looked like a thousand other Zurich women. All right, not all of them had such flaming red hair, but it couldn’t be that.
And yet they had known straight away. Had smelled it. Hunting dogs, picking up a scent.
She turned to one side and tried to appraise her profile from the corner of her eye. There was nothing remarkable about it. Nothing that would make you think straight away, of course, a Jew. There was nothing.
She didn’t wear a sheitel, even as a married woman she wouldn’t have worn one, and she would never have put on one of those old-fashioned high-necked dresses by which you could recognise the Orthodox women, above all the ones from the East, at first glance. She dressed fashionably, always from the latest collection, she owed the company that, and her lipstick was the colour of the season.
And yet . . .
She was already lighting her fourth cigarette, and still couldn’t calm down.
She had gone to the pub, Kanonengasse was just around the corner from the Posmaniks, three steps led from the street up to the front door, the door had been open, it was a mild evening, she had pushed aside the curtain, a piece of fabric, heavy and saturated with cigar-smoke, she had gone in, a woman like a thousand others in a perfectly ordinary pub, no one had paid her any attention, not at first, she had gone up to the counter, the landlord no different from other landlords, his shirt-sleeves rolled up and fastened with a rubber band, she had asked him for the telephone, and he had pointed the way with his thumb, without taking the Brissago out of his mouth, not very polite, but that was nothing special, it was just his way.
The phone was fixed to the wall, opposite the corridor to the toilets, she had dialled Arthur’s number, other numbers and names were scribbled in pencil on the wallpaper, and an there was an enamel sign for Wädenswiler beer, even though they served Hürlimann here. She hadn’t had to wait long. Arthur answered immediately, with his mouth full, he was just eating, she told him what she had to say, he promised to come, it only took a minute, two at the most, but when she hung up and turned round again, all the people were sitting at the table with their heads raised, they’d picked up a scent, they looked at her, almost pleased, as one might look at an unexpected gift, one of them got up and was about to walk towards her, another held her back, she felt it more than she saw it, and then there was the landlord who didn’t want her to pay for her call, ‘you can keep your dirty Jewish money,’ the Brissago still in his mouth. Ash fell into a half-poured beer glass, she saw it as if there was nothing else to see.
And then another one got up, and another one, no one was holding the men back now. Faces that frightened her, and then she had run away, had stumbled down the three steps and almost fallen into the street. Behind her they had laughed, a jeering, barking laugh, and if she had broken her neck they’d have been really happy.
How had they known? Rachel couldn’t work it out
They might have listened to her conversation, but she didn’t talk any differently from anyone else from Zurich, and she didn’t have a crooked nose.
She didn’t give anyone a reason, a cause, she didn’t stand out.
And even if she had stood out . . . That still gave them no right. If someone walked through the city in peasant costume, he stood out. If someone was big or small or had a hunchback. That couldn’t be a reason.
‘If you stand out, it’s your own fault,’ Joni Leibowitz had said, an
d Herr Grün had taken an iron and hit him on the head with it.
Herr Grün, with his teeth chattering under the blanket.
Luckily it wasn’t pneumonia, Arthur had said, not quite. With peace and attention and good food everything would be cured. Herr Grün had had an injection, and already his breathing was calmer now, and he didn’t try to get up again. He slept, or at least he was anaesthetised.
Arthur had written out a prescription for a medicine that was to be collected from the chemist’s, and had pressed the money for it into Frau Posmanik’s hand. He had done it secretly, almost awkwardly, not because he was embarrassed about his generosity, but because he didn’t want her husband to see it, when he would probably have converted the few francs into alcohol. The little boy – who was dressed now – asked him for cough sweets, and Arthur actually did conjure something sweet for him and his two siblings out of his case.
Later, when he drove Rachel home in his little Fiat, he asked her, ‘Did he ever say anything about being in a re-education camp?’
Re-education camp. Some also said: concentration camp.
‘He never says anything. What gives you that idea?’
‘His back is covered with scars. From beatings, I would say.’
Of course.
Four thousand eight hundred and ninety-two.
What importance does one’s own name have if one has been given a number in one of those camps? ‘Grünbaum, Grünfeld – just choose something.’
His suit was made for a fat man, and that fat man had been Herr Grün himself. Before he . . .
Of course.
Joni had claimed that it was your own fault if you ended up in a camp, and he had torn into him.
Of course.
But why didn’t he say so?
In one of his letters Ruben had written, ‘The ones who come back don’t talk about it.’
Just like Herr Grün.
Only he must have told Zalman about it, after he had waited for him for so long, he must have told him everything he’d been through, and then Zalman had decided to help him. Even though Herr Grün couldn’t sew. He was a learned man. Someone who had had to learn to deal with everything.
Melnitz Page 68