Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

They would absolutely have to meet again, her husband would want to thank Chanele for her kindness in person, and who knows, perhaps Chanele might even know someone who… How old had she said her youngest was, the latecomer? Thirty-three? Then it was high time he thought of getting married. ‘Being alone puts stupid ideas in your head!’ Yes, they would certainly see each other again, tomorrow would be best of all, but now Malka had to go and look for her husband and her daughter. They had wanted to sit down in the patisserie garden, where you could see and be seen, but all the tables there had been occupied, they must have gone somewhere else and were bound to be wondering where she’d got to, she would really have to go. ‘Shake hands with the lady like a good boy, Mottele! You must be moichel to him, he’s all over the place today, normally he’s quite well-behaved.’

When Chanele came back to the hotel room, Janki was lying on the bed with his dirty shoes on, fast asleep. He was snoring and smelled of beer.

Janki didn’t mind Chanele leaving him alone; in fact it suited him. His new friends — by now he also knew their names: Hofmeister, Neuberth, Kessler and von Stetten — took up all his time, almost around the clock. They expected him at eleven o’clock in the morning, when one had barely struggled out of bed, for a buffet breakfast, where one had to eat smoked eel — treyf, but not at all bad — and other fatty things because it was traditionally believed that they more than anything else helped to absorb the alcohol from the previous evening, and then, to clear their heads, they went for a healthy walk along the beach, but they never got any further than the Strandcafé, where they were already expected and their beers were served without them even asking for them. There, over the course of the next few hours, they became first patriotic and then emotional, they sang under the direction of Neuberth, who was a member of a men’s singing club, romantic songs so mellifluous that they were moved to tears: ‘In the tower at Sedan a Frenchman stands, clutching his rifle in his hands.’ But they were never again as drunk as they had been on the first day; they saved that up for the evening. They said their goodbyes at the door of their hotels, none of which were nearly as smart as the Atlantic, as elaborately as if they weren’t going to see each other again for years, when in fact they were only parting for the duration of the table d’hôte where, each in his own price category, they lined their stomachs ready for a night spent drinking in Tacke Blecken’s Cellar. The place was otherwise avoided by the spa guests, because in this drinking den, the last refuge of locals and sailors, one occasionally came across ladies whose faded charms might only have seduced a seafarer who hadn’t set foot on dry land for many months. They had commandeered the round table for the duration, right under Tacke Blecken’s celebrated chandelier consisting of an old model galleon and a set of elk antlers. Tacke, who was said once to have been a captain, until he had run his cutter aground on a reef while three sheets to the wind, poured a drink that might have been called grog, but which contained, along with rum, sugar and water, other ingredients that made one seriously philosophical after the first glass.

Apart from a few hasty adventures on business trips, Janki’s life had never presented him with the opportunity to let his hair down properly like this. All the greater then was his enjoyment of his late-blossoming bachelor life, he called for one round after another, and was in the meantime able to give such a detailed account of his experiences at Sedan that the battle would have had to last three days to include them all. So he thought he remembered — and each glass of grog made the memory clearer — how he had rescued an injured comrade from enemy fire at great risk to his own life, and from whom he had later received the walking stick with the lion’s-head handle by way of thanks, a distinction, he claimed, that was far more precious to him than any medal that the state might have been able to award him.

Of course the others noticed that he was exaggerating, but they weren’t bothered; they were doing exactly the same thing themselves. The Wound Badge awarded to Hofmeister, for example, which he always wore proudly on the lapel of his coat on Sedan Day, a picture of King Karl of Württemberg with the caption ‘For loyal duty in war’, was really a simple silver medal of the kind that was generously distributed at a time of general triumph. Hofmeister, a cosy innkeeper from Nürtingen, had been part of a supply unit in the war, and as he stood over his cooking pots had heard nothing more of the whole battle than the distant roar of cannon. Why should he have doubted other people’s accounts of the battle, as long as they didn’t call his own heroism into question?

Von Stetten, the oldest of the group, was the only one of them to have been an officer at Sedan, a dashing lieutenant, as he put it who, if he hadn’t been so discreet, could have told them stories about his conquests with the ladies, ‘it would make your hair curl, gentlemen!’ He had preserved the custom from those days of twirling his moustache at the conclusion of each sentence, so that the ends stood up like confirmatory exclamation marks.

Every night they drank Tacke Blecken’s mysterious grog, smoked the cigars that Janki was allowed to bring and, behind a curtain of smoke and male laughter — ‘Ha!’ — they created their own world, into which only warriors were allowed, no civilians and certainly no women.

Chanele, for her part was not unhappy to see her husband occupied, although the stench of smoke and grog that he brought into the room in the early morning was thoroughly repellent. But that was a small price to pay for the fact that she was free of the need not just to be in a summer resort, but also of having to play the role of the summer resort guest. By the time Janki rolled out of bed with a hangover, she had long since put on one of her simple Liberty dresses in which she felt most comfortable, had had breakfast and left the hotel.

She even discovered a new passion for which she had never in her life found time: the Atlantic had a reading room, and there she picked a book from the shelf at random, a different one every day, took it with her to the water, sat down in her wicker beach chair and enjoyed the luxury of problems and entanglements that one could snap shut and set aside whenever one wished. So even though she wasn’t aware of it, she spent her holiday much as Janki did: in a world that didn’t really exist.

But her peace was repeatedly disturbed by the Wassersteins, who had set up their rented beach chairs — not one, not two, but three! — in her immediate vicinity, and were firmly resolved not only to nurture Chanele’s acquaintance, but to appropriate it entirely to themselves.

Hersch Wasserstein was smaller than his wife, a squat, curly-haired bundle of energy. On this beach spending time in the water was not considered truly healthy, but still he wore a black bathing costume all the time, from whose neck curly chest hair sprouted, and a straw hat with a coloured ribbon of the kind sold in all the souvenir shops of Westerland. His arms and legs were burnt bright red, but in spite of his wife’s warnings he never spent long in the shadow of his beach chair, and was instead constantly doing something, either fetching glasses of lemonade — ‘You have one too, Frau Meijer, do me the honour!’ — or helping Motti set up a water wheel in the moat of his sandcastle, exactly the same system, incidentally — ‘This is bound to interest you, Frau Meijer!’ — on which the sawmill in Marjampol operated.

His wife, who had talked away at Chanele the first time they met as if words were going to double in price the following day, said little in her husband’s presence. Apart from, ‘What do you mean, Hersch?’ and ‘Quite right, Hersch!’ she was hardly ever heard. But that was still more than her daughter said.