Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Chaje Sore Wasserstein was insulted, not for any concrete reason, but in principle. The lemonade wasn’t cold enough, the sand too hot, the young men one met here no better than the ones in Marjampol — and she said all that without words, she just let the corners of her mouth droop, studied her fingernails and groaned every now and again as if the whole world had conspired to turn her twenty-one-year-old life into a living hell. From childhood onwards her parents had assured her that things would get better, and Chaje Sore Wasserstein was of the view that they certainly had not kept their promise.

Hersch was a very talkative man and insisted on telling Chanele in great detail about all the dreadful things they had experienced in their first resort of Borkum. Little Motti’s sandcastle had been trampled to pieces, there had been a map on the wall of their hotel showing the route from Borkum to Jerusalem, a brazen message to them that they should go there and not come back, and at the spa concert everyone had sung a song, the Borkum song, whose last lines he would never forget if he lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, God willing. ‘But those who approach you with flat feet,’ they had sung, ‘with noses crooked and curly hair, they should not enjoy your beach, away with them, away with them!’ They had left very quickly, they had fled, in fact, to be honest, and here on Sylt it was really much better, ‘don’t you think, Frau Meijer?’

Chanele would have preferred to withdraw behind her book, but the insistent attention of her new acquaintances repeatedly kept her from doing so. Sometimes when she dozed off for a few minutes in the midday heat, characters from the two worlds merged, a Bedouin prince from an adventure story assumed the features of Hersch Wasserstein, and the beautiful countess that he was holding prisoner had the same pinched little mouth as Chaje Sore.

Janki dreamed too, or rather: the six musketeers, as they called themselves, pursued a common dream. They couldn’t remember which of them had had the idea first, most likely it had been Staudinger, who was something like the chairman of their association. For days now they had all been weaving away at it and, inspired by beer and grog, drawing ever brighter colours through the beautiful picture. In Westerland, they knew from before, 2 September was decked with bunting in honour of Sedan Day, and the mayor laid a wreath for the fallen on the victory monument, but was that really enough for such an important day? The fact that the hotels decorated their dining rooms in black, white and red, and the chefs invented new patriotic names for their old recipes — Hofmeister, who knew about such things, remembered very ordinary Büsum shrimps which had appeared on the table bearing the name ‘Field Marshal Moltke prawns’ — that the spa band had played patriotic tunes and that the battle flag had flown on many a sandcastle, that was all well and good, but not enough for true veterans, who had risked life and limb in that battle.

‘Someone’, Staudinger said, ‘should organise a central event, with speeches and honours…’

‘… and’, Kessler went on toying with the idea, ‘hire a hall in a hotel…’ and of course Janki cried, ‘In the Atlantic, where else?’ There was in fact a big ballroom there, where meetings and dances were held, and the manager — ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see to it!’ — was sure to make it available to them, the spa newspaper would publish big advertisements, the house band would play something dignified rather than the inevitable tangos — ‘The Hohenfriedberg March’, suggested the musical Neuberth, ‘composed by Old Fritz in person’ — the war veterans would march into those sounds and then… Yes, they weren’t quite clear about what would happen then, so they ordered the next round of Tacke Blecken’s mysterious grog, rested their heads on their hands and gave it some thought.

‘I have given it some thought,’ said Hersch Wasserstein, ‘and in fact it could all be done very quickly and without any fuss.’ He had sent his family on a walk and was now kneeling in the sand beside Chanele’s beach chair, as Sir Walter Raleigh knelt before the throne of Queen Elizabeth in the book she was just reading. ‘How do you like my Chaje Sore?’

‘Charming, quite charming,’ said Chanele, for where does it say in the Shulchan Aruch that you are supposed to rob a proud father of his illusions?

‘She is a pearl of a child, of the kind all Jewish parents would wish. A little quiet, perhaps, but then silence is golden, isn’t that right?’

Chanele, holding her index finger impatiently between the pages of the book, confirmed that his observation was quite correct.

‘And she will have a nedinye… We are not rich people, but God willing, we are fine.’ His wife had said the same thing word for word; she had the tendency of quoting her husband’s words without divulging the source, as one quotes a proverb or a well-known aphorism. ‘Yes, my Chaje Sore is a good match, and angel, God willing, and at twenty-one she is exactly the right age. Your son is a doctor, isn’t he?’

‘Arthur? You mean that Chaje Sore and Arthur…?’

‘He’s thirty-three, my wife tells me. Exactly the right distance between them. Of course my Malka sees shidduchim everywhere. What do they say? “God couldn’t be everywhere, so he created the Jewish Mamme.” But I like the thought. A doctor from Zurich — it’s a far cry from a chandler or a trader in Herring. Everyone thinks they’re something, while in fact… In a little village it’s easy to be a king. So, Frau Meijer, what do you say? Are we agreed? Shall we shake on it?’

Chanele didn’t pull a face and it wasn’t easy. Hersch Wasserstein looked so ridiculous, kneeling in front of her there in the sand, in his bathing costume like the ones that wrestlers wear at the funfair, and with the straw hat that he had bought two sizes too small. He actually held his hand out to her the way Salomon had done when a cattle trade had been concluded and only needed to be sealed, he really thought he could do the deal here on the spot and then move on to truly important matters like the prices on the lumber market and how last winter’s storms would affect them.

But he was also a father, who wanted the best for his daughter.

Chanele remembered Zalman asking so clumsily for Hinda’s hand, that had been ridiculous as well, and the pair had been happy together, she thought of all the things she herself had done to marry off François, so she didn’t laugh, but just said, ‘Not so fast, Herr Wasserstein. You don’t even know my son.’

‘I know his mother!’ he said and with an elegant motion that would have suited a frock coat better than a sweaty bathing costume, Wasserstein put his hand to his heart. ‘If the son is bentshed with only ten per cent of your charm… What am I saying?’ he broke off and began to negotiate with himself to hike up the compliment, ‘If he has only five per cent, only one per cent…’

‘You don’t know him,’ Chanele repeated, ‘and in any case: you would have to discuss such matters with my husband.’

‘Very sensible,’ said Hersch Wasserstein. ‘Business is men’s affair. I have also made some inquiries. Tell me: this Meijer who has that fine store in Zurich — is he mishpocha of yours?’

‘Meijer,’ said von Stetten, ‘that is a good German name. We had a Meier in our regiment, he even became a district president.’

They were sitting at their regular table in the Strandcafé, and the first round of beers stood still untouched on the table. The six musketeers had a lot of things to discuss, because something that had originated as an idea prompted by beer or grog had quickly assumed concrete forms, so quickly that they were quite alarmed. The management had made the ballroom available to them, for free, and had undertaken, at its own suggestion, to ensure that it was appropriately decorated. The editor of the Kuranzeiger , with whom they had very cautiously discussed their plan, immediately went great guns for it, and contacted all the associations on the island, all of which now wanted to take part in the parade. At that point the mayor of Westerland had suddenly realised that he had long ago conceived this plan himself, and offered not only to greet the heroes of Sedan with a word of welcome, but also to award them the Sylt badge of honour, a distinction normally reserved for hoteliers celebrating their anniversaries or for particularly meritorious wine suppliers.