Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

‘A terrible person, that Alfred,’ said Lea to Désirée, but a speck of soot had just landed on Désirée’s white dress, and she had to concentrate on removing it again with her fingertips.

The Meijers were travelling first class. It was meshuga expensive, but they could afford it, and although Chanele protested — ‘Since when have we been called Rothschild?’ — she was quite glad that they had a compartment all to themselves for the very long journey. In Baden-Oos, where the train stopped for a few minutes, she looked yearningly out of the window; if Janki hadn’t set his sights on Sylt, of all places, they would have been at their destination already. A cure was a cure in the end, and whether you were getting bored in a thermal spa or on the beach, it didn’t really make much difference, at least to her.

Janki’s leg hurt from sitting down for so long, and even his travelling slippers brought him no relief, but because he had been the one who decided that this beach resort and no other was the right one, he couldn’t show his complaints.

He had never admitted the true reason for his choice to Chanele: in the Journal des Modes , which he studied each month from the first page to the last, it had said that the Austrian imperial court tailor Kniže spent the summer months on Sylt in Westerland every year, and Kniže was, where elegance and social correctness were concerned, the measure of all things at the time. He was even — and this had only ever previously been reported of François Delormes — said to have refused to make a pair of trousers for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, just because the successor to the throne had insisted on a cut that Kniže considered unsuitable.

Eventually — ‘I’d rather clean up for Pesach three times in a row than ever endure such a journey again!’ — they ended up in Hamburg, where Janki had reserved a room with running water at the Vier Jahreszeiten, another waste of time, and just for an overnight stay. He had firmly resolved to spare nothing on this journey. You don’t sell your business only to mortify yourself afterwards.

The next day they had to cram themselves back onto a train, a little branch line to a backwater called Hoyerschleuse, from where the steamer left for Sylt. There was only one first-class compartment, with ancient upholstery that smelled damp and rotten as if a few farmers had been comparing samples of manure on the previous journey. The railway official Janki wanted to complain to about it spoke such broad dialect that no normal person could have understood a word.

To top it all, they didn’t even have the compartment to themselves. Just before the train set off, they were joined by a distracted-looking man, immediately identifiable as an old soldier even though he was wearing civilian clothes. He excused himself very correctly for the disturbance, but in such a clipped and flippant voice that his apology, for all the politeness of the words, sounded more like an attack.

Their new fellow passenger sat down opposite Janki and Chanele, and at first there was one of those unpleasant pauses in which etiquette dictates that one pays no attention to a person even though he is sitting right in front of one. The man, about Janki’s age, wore a hunting suit of dark-green loden, and his hat, which he had raised briefly to Chanele when he got in, was decorated with a little feather. An ugly, brownish, discoloured scar ran from his left eye almost all the way to his chin. ‘It must be a schmiss from one of those idiotic student fraternities,’ thought Janki. ‘It’s a shame we can’t show it to Alfred, he’d soon lose his taste for such goyim naches.’

The man noticed Janki’s gaze, probably read his thoughts as well, and said in a booming voice, ‘Grenade splinter. 1870. Sedan.’

And without thinking, Janki replied, ‘Sedan? I was there too.’

‘Really?’ The man could not have beamed more happily at Janki if he had been his long lost brother. He immediately leapt to his feet, which meant that Janki couldn’t help getting up too, and because the compartment wasn’t very spacious, the two men were standing as close together as if they were about to hug and kiss. But in the end they only shook hands and sat back down in their seats with the awkwardness of people unaccustomed to intimacy.

‘No one will ever believe it!’ said the man. He had shed his parade-ground voice as abruptly as one loosens a tight collar among friends, and a South German twinge could now be heard in his voice. ‘Absolutely mind-boggling.’ There could be no doubt. This was the strongest expression of surprise that he could think of.

He stared in amazement at Janki, shaking his head, as if Janki couldn’t possibly exist, let alone in this train, and then leapt back up again, he couldn’t stay in his seat, doffed his hat and introduced himself, ‘Staudinger’.

‘Meijer,’ said Janki. To be quite correct he should probably have got to his feet as well, but there was simply too little room between the seats. So he just inclined his head and gestured vaguely to Chanele. ‘My wife.’

Staudinger pulled his hat from his head again and clicked his heels together. Then he bent over Chanele’s hand and pressed a kiss upon it, not an elegant hint at a kiss, but a real one, smacking and damp. ‘It is an honour, Frau Meijer,’ he said. ‘It is a joy. The wife of a comrade-in-arms.’

‘Do sit down,’ said Chanele, who was already feeling ill from the shaking of the train and the mouldy smell of the upholstery.

Staudinger sat down, repeated once again that the hen in the pan would go crazy, and then leapt back up again. ‘Fifth Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Second Battalion,’ he announced this time. ‘Based in Aschaffenburg. And you, Comrade?’

‘Twentieth Corps. Second Division. Fourth Batallion of the Régiment du Haut Rhin. Based in Colmar.’

‘Colmar? But that wasn’t even…’

‘I am a Frenchman,’ said Janki.

Staudinger sat down again as suddenly as if someone had kicked him in the back of the knees.

‘You were…?’

‘On the other side,’ said Janki, gripping the handle of his walking stick more firmly.

But Staudinger was enthusiastic. ‘This is amazing!’ he said. ‘Absolutely mind… Where did your regiment fight?’

Chanele held her handkerchief in front of her face, probably because of the unpleasant smell. Janki had been asked so often by admiring lady customers to tell them about his heroic warlike deeds that he was not lost for an answer. ‘A soldier goes where he is sent,’ he said. ‘When the bullets are flying around your head, you don’t ask questions about geography.’

‘Correct,’ said Staudinger. ‘Absolutely correct. We were all young at the time, and didn’t know that we’d have to talk about it for the rest of our lives.’

‘Which you probably enjoy doing more than I do.’

‘Why?’

‘You won the war.’

Staudinger let out a barking ‘Ha!’ which was probably supposed to be a cordial, comradely laugh. ‘Very good. Really very good. I’ll have to remember that one. “You won the war.”’ Again he said ‘Ha!’ and that seemed to get the preliminaries out of the way as far as he was concerned, and he started relating his own experiences of the war. ‘We were standing at the Porte de Mézières. Have you heard of it? No? Well, it wasn’t right at the front as such, but it was a strategically very important point that absolutely had to be held. I can list the positions if you like. Well, perhaps another time. We will see each other again, I hope. Are you bound for Sylt as well? Westerland? Me too. We’ll absolutely have to… Which hotel? The Atlantic? On Herrenbadstrasse, I know. An elegant place, very distinguished, not everyone can afford it. I certainly can’t. Ha!’ He performed his laugh as if it were a duty, and then continued with his monologue, which he had doubtless delivered many times, word for word. ‘So our emplacement was at this gate, along with the first Battalion and a company of riflemen that had been assigned to us, and the grenades were flying over our heads. If you were there, you know the sound, that whoosh that gets louder and louder until you want to bury yourself in the ground. But we had an old colonel, Niedermayer was his name, a proper, cosy old Bavarian, never promoted beyond a certain point because of some old story or other, even though he was very hard working, he just laughed when we threw ourselves down, and said, “If you can hear them, they’ve already gone past.” And that was exactly how it was with me. I never heard the grenade that got me. Didn’t hear it at all, just imagine. Only my face was suddenly very hot, no pain, nothing at all at first, just that feeling of heat, and something damp ran over my hands; at first I thought my flask had been hit. But it was my own blood. So I was only vaguely aware of most of it, the French waving their white flags like mad, I don’t want to be rude, but that was how it was, and the peace negotiator coming through our ranks… But you’ll know all that. Until at last the medical corps came and…’ He suddenly broke off and looked at Janki with a slightly suspicious expression. ‘Were you injured too?’