Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

They celebrated, and they raised the glasses.

Janki, who wasn’t used to beer, couldn’t hear everything that the comrades told him, only that all five of them, albeit in different units, had been at the Battle of Sedan, that they had met much later at a Sedan Day celebration on Sylt, and had decided henceforth to meet in the same place every year and commemorate the day together, as a kind of veterans’ reunion or even just as a men’s group outing, ‘any excuse to leave the old woman at home, I bet you feel exactly the same, don’t you, chum?’

They were by now on first-name terms, they had solemnly included Janki in their circle in a drunken ceremony in which Chanele’s parasol had to stand in for the sword in the dubbing ritual, and when they walked him back to the Atlantic they all had their arms around each other’s shoulders, out of comradeliness as much as a lack of balance, and together they sang the song about an old comrade, and how you’ll never find a better one.

Janki had left the parasol in the Strandcafé.

Even though it would soon be evening, hence time to change for the table d’hôte, Chanele wasn’t yet back at the hotel. While Janki was learning to drain a glass of beer without setting it down, she had found the little boy’s mother.

‘Your dress,’ was the first thing the woman had said, ‘for heaven’s sake, your beautiful dress! Motti, what have you been up to this time?’ And then she had been very relieved that Chanele hadn’t been looking for her because of the stain on her dress, but because it was high time the little boy was finally, finally able to wail out his woes.

They hadn’t let him play.

He had wanted to join in with the company of drilling children, with spades over their shoulders and sailors’ caps at an angle, as they all did, he had paid close attention and followed the orders, ‘Right turn!’ and ‘At ease!’ and ‘Pre-sent… arms!’, he had done everything right, he’d definitely done everything right, and still the twelve-year-old, who was the officer and who was able to issue whatever orders he liked, had pushed him away and said, ‘Not you.’ Just: ‘Not you.’ And when he had tried to join the ranks again anyway, the elbows had spread and the spade-handles had been used as bayonets, and the officer had grabbed him by the ear and pulled him out of the formation and said, Jews can’t be soldiers.

And now his mother was to come, right now, and tell the others they had to let him join in with the game.

‘I’m sure it’s been over for ages,’ the woman said comfortingly, even though they could still here the jangle of the Turkish crescent. She blew her son’s nose, straightened his sailor’s cap and promised him that Tata would buy him a new spade for the beach, a much, much nicer one.

Then she sighed deeply and said to Chanele with a sad smile, ‘You don’t know how people sometimes treat us Jews.’

‘Me neshuma, I know,’ replied Chanele.

‘You too?’ the woman said with relief. ‘I should have known, with those eyebrows.’

Of course they fell into conversation, and of course they had lots to tell each other. Or rather: the little boy’s mother told Chanele’s lots of things. She was one of those people who are usually quiet out of shyness, but who then, when the person they are talking to proves not to be a threat, let the flow of words surge over the banks like a flood.

Malka Wasserstein came from Marjampol in Galicia, no need to have heard of the town — town? It was a backwater, a fly-speck on the map, nothing at all. Her husband had made a certain amount of money there with a sawmill — ‘We’re no Rothschilds, but God willing we found ourselves very well off’ — and that had caused a problem — ‘A problem? May all Jewish children have such a problem!’ — that would never have occurred to them before: there was no husband for their daughter to be found for far and wide. Little Motti had an elder sister, and he himself had been a latecomer, an afterthought — ‘born when I already thought my time was over. But Riboyne shel Oylem must know what he’s doing.’

Chanele could hardly interject that she too had had a latecomer, and that she sometimes even found herself thinking that Arthur was the nicest of all her children. Malka’s words had spread their elbows too, leaving as little room for other words as the drilling children had for little Motti.

So there was Chaje Sore, almost fifteen years older than her brother — ‘Motti, leave that, we don’t play with things like that!’ — a girl of already twenty-one, God willing, and still unmarried. Of course there had been proposals — ‘The shadchonim overran the house, she could have had anyone in the district, a golden key opens every lock’ — but why should Chaje Sore marry a chandler or a herring trader or — ‘God preserve us!’ — an innkeeper who has to drink l’chayim with every customer and stinks of bronfen by the time he eventually crawls into bed? Not that we thought we were finer than other people — ‘May my tongue fall from my mouth if I ever said such a thing!’ — but one wants the best for one’s children, otherwise why would one break one’s back a whole life long?

‘How many children to you have?’ asked Malka, but didn’t wait for the answer, her sluice-gates were too wide open, but instead reported on how her husband Hersch — ‘I sometimes call him Hershele Ostropoler after the famous jester, because he has such meshuganeh ideas’ — had hit upon the notion of crossing the sea, not for a holiday — ‘I need that like a corpse needs suction cups!’ — but because he wanted to meet people, voyleh Juden, who also had children and who were on the lookout for a shidduch, and who one knew for certain moved in the right circles, precisely because such a summer resort cost a lot of money and not everyone could afford it.

When Malka Wasserstein talked like that, she sounded a bit like a schoolgirl hoping to impress her teachers with undigested phrases from her parents’ conversation. Outwardly, too, she looked like a little girl dressed as a grown-up, because — only in Marjampol could it have been considered elegant — she had chosen a street dress of very colourful, broad-striped silk fabric that swathed her chubby figure like casually tied-up wrapping paper. With it she wore a hat with a heron-feather, which Chanele would never have sold anyone for afternoon wear; heron feathers belonged in the ballroom, where it was this season’s fashion to let it bob along when dancing the tango.

But much more than her clothes, it was her movements that made Malka’s origins in the Galician provinces unmistakeable. She talked with her hands, and with her gestures even the story of her holiday turned into a dramatic event.

So they had set off — ‘The cost! The bother!’ — but of course Hersch hadn’t looked into everything in advance, he always liked to get things done quickly, he plunged into everything he did like a bridegroom into a mikvah, and he had actually booked their holiday on Borkum, Borkum of all places! Did Chanele have any idea how they did things there?

No, she could have no idea, and she should thank God that she didn’t! He had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, but he must have overlooked Borkum, because that place was far, far worse than the two biblical cities, an island full of reshoim. Malka never wished harm on anyone, but if a flood came and washed the whole pile of sand into the sea, she at least wouldn’t weep a tear for it, and when she passed the graves of the people, she would dance on them, yes, she would dance.

On Borkum the following had happened…

But now Malka had been so busy telling her stories that she had forgotten the time, and she had only left the spa concert very quickly to go in search of Hersch and Chaje Sore, she had thought that her Motti — ‘Put that down, Motti, who knows who else might have picked it up!’ — was playing peacefully with the other children, you never had a moment’s peace, and why people went on holiday for pleasure she would never know, even if she were to live, touch wood, to a hundred and twenty.