Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

He had just wanted to try it out.

No, that wasn’t true. It had been more than curiosity.

Much more.

Joni had come to him with a pulled muscle, nothing serious, not even particularly painful, but the next weekend there was to be a competition, and he wanted to know if there wasn’t a remedy for it, something to rub in or something, because this particular competition was particularly important. ‘Are you interested in wrestling, Doctor?’

And Arthur had said, ‘Please slip out of your things.’

Sometimes quite ordinary sentences, sentences that one has said a thousand times, suddenly acquire a new meaning, the words come freshly coined from the mint, gleaming and new.

Please slip out of your things.

Open, Sesame.

He had used, ‘du’, the informal form of address, of course he had. The boy was seventeen, no longer a child, but not yet a man either. Why shouldn’t he have called him ‘du’?

There was no ulterior motive.

And then Joni had been standing naked before him. For the first time.

His muscles weren’t particularly powerful. Not for a wrestler. A brutal fighter could have grabbed him and broken him. Could have hurt him. Quite slim hips. And his belly… Tense, as if a clenched fist were hidden in there, just waiting to be…

Stop. Jonathan Leibowitz. A patient. Rectus abdominis well developed. Legs perhaps slightly too sturdy for real symmetry. Flat feet? No, it was just the way he was standing. Combative was the wrong word. He wasn’t just ready to fight, he was ready for anything.

‘Did you say something, Doctor?’

His voice. Like running a hand over your arm without quite touching it, just brushing the fine hairs so that they stand up and yearn for more — that was the sort of voice that Joni Leibowitz had.

‘Did you say something?’

A strain in the levator scapulae, hence the slight pain when he had to move his shoulder. Arthur showed Joni the muscle on one of the coloured posters that he’d been given for the opening of his own practice. The flayed man, one arm resting, the other held aloft, always reminded him of the bloody martyr in the poster for the panopticon all those years ago. That had been another such day, a day that had changed everything, when nothing afterwards was where it had been, when one suddenly understood…

‘What can we do about it, Doctor?’

He had prescribed him an ointment that would help or not, and said, ‘Can you come back a week today? I would like to take another look at you.’

All of a sudden the most natural sentences were no longer so natural.

I would like to take another look at you.

Then he had gone to the fight. Just like that. In the Israelitisches Wochenblatt there had been a small advertisement requesting support for the Jewish Gymnastics Club, so why shouldn’t he go, when he had nothing better to do on that Sunday afternoon? He would just say he’d dropped by at the schoolhouse on the Hirschengraben, he would just mingle among the spectators, but there were hardly spectators there, there was no real competition, and the wrestlers — this made it much easier for him later on — didn’t have many fans anyway. The people looked around when he came into the gym, and Sally Steigrad, the chairman of the club, hurried towards him, garrulous as befits an insurance salesman, and greeted the young doctor as a welcome guest of honour.

Joni was sitting on a bench next to three other wrestlers, all four of them in long white gymnastic trousers and tight vests. A curl had fallen into his forehead, he threw his head to one side and his eye caught, by chance — but nothing that Joni did involved chance, it wasn’t possible that this could all be chance — his eye, as if by chance, caught Arthur’s. Then he smiled, and seemed to lose interest in the new spectator.

As Arthur was to discover, Joni had two kinds of smile, a public and a private one.

In the middle of the vast gym the mats had been laid out, a raft in the sea, and the spectators arranged themselves around it in almost indecent proximity. They were competing in only four weight categories, the young Jewish gymnastics club did not yet have any more wrestlers to offer. It was a very unequal competition: inexperienced rookies against confident veterans, who knew all the holds and counterholds and gained their points routinely, as a matter of course. Joni’s turn was last; the score was already three-nil, and his fight was no longer significant. But he was to be brought out anyway, Sally Steigrad had agreed with the chairman of the opposing team, ‘My boys need experience.’

Joni’s opponent had very hairy arms, far too coarse to be grappling with this slender boy’s body.

Far too coarse.

When the two of them stood facing one another and entered the first clinch, when they pressed their torsos against one another, golem and angel, when their heads touched as if in a caress, Arthur had to take off his glasses and rub his nose. He had been seized by a strange emotion, a not unpleasant sadness that brought tears to his eyes.

Then the fight was over. Joni had been knocked off his feet, his opponent left the raft of mats, had finished his job, which had been strenuous but not particularly difficult, and Joni was still lying on the mat with his face contorted, pointing at his shoulder, which his opponent had tugged at like a farm hand straightening a sack of corn before getting a proper hold of it and throwing it on the pile with the others.

‘Would you be so kind, Doctor?’ asked Sally Steigrad.

It was as if Joni had no smell of his own. The sweat of his hairy opponent rose into Arthur’s nose, the dust of the mat he knelt on, and the sour aroma of effort and exhaustion common to all gyms in the world. But Joni? Even when he bent over him to examine the injury, there was no scent for him to catch. Or was it so close to his own that he wasn’t even aware of it, as one isn’t aware of one’s own smell?

‘The same spot again?’ Arthur asked.

Joni turned his head towards him and smiled at him from below, with his very private smile.

‘Oh, please, Doctor,’ said Joni, ‘when can I have another appointment with you?’

It was the first time he had said it.

That was how it started.

Arthur would have done anything to be close to Joni, and Sally Steigrad was proud of this new, academic member whose suddenly awakened interest in wrestling he attributed to himself, or at least to the appeal that he had placed in the Wochenblatt . Arthur was not a really gifted athlete, but he tried, and as a medic he had the advantage that he knew about bones and sinews, and didn’t need to have the holds and their effects explained to him in great detail. He just had to overcome the inhibition of applying that knowledge practically in a fight.

In training, his partner was usually Joni Leibowitz, who was in the same weight category. They were a good pairing, Sally Steigrad thought, as he looked at them. They often worked together on their technique, when the others were already getting dressed again.

Arthur couldn’t have explained what happened between himself and Joni during this time, although in sleepless nights he analysed every look caught by chance — by chance? — and every offhand remark for hidden meanings. He had never been in love before, and could not interpret the condition that assailed him, could not begin to interpret that illness. No one had ever told him that love is confusion above all.

Joni was only seventeen, an apprentice in his uncle’s stationery shop, and reacted with much greater calm than the doctor with all his book-learning. He interpreted Arthur’s vague feelings before he really understood them himself, and seemed to fee neither hurt nor threatened by them. He played quite unselfconsciously with the power they gave him over the older man, and he did that without any malice, just as a cat feels no hatred for the mouse that it allows to escape and catches again and allows to escape and catches again. Whether Joni returned his love — yes, it was love, Arthur had had to admit it, and since then felt strangely relieved — whether he felt the same or at least something similar, that was a question to which Arthur never found a certain answer, right until the end.