Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Arthur won his first bout, quite to his own surprise. It was in the return round of the championship — the more modest the sporting achievements, the more seriously one takes rules and plans — and the Jewish Gymnastics Club was already abjectly at the bottom of the table. The opposing team was the same one as the one at Arthur’s very first visit to the gym, the Workers’ Gymnastics Club from Wiedikon, all people who did hard physical work in the factory day after day, and who had chosen wrestling as a sport because they needed an outlet for their surplus strength at the weekend as well. Arthur faced the same man who had defeated and injured Joni, who had dared to hurt Joni, and when he felt the man’s hairy arm against his body, he was suddenly assailed, for the first time in his life, which had hitherto always been mild and theoretical, with such boundless fury that they had had finally to drag him off his opponent, because he refused to relax his neck wrench long after his opponent had knocked on the mat as a sign of giving in.

‘Now we’ve taught you how to give it an edge,’ Sally Steigrad said, and attributed this success to himself as well.

Afterwards they stood side by side at the wash basin. Joni threw his curl out of his forehead and said, ‘I know what you want from me.’ They called each other ‘du’, of course, fellow sportsmen call each other ‘du’, there’s nothing special about it. ‘I know what you want,’ said Joni, ‘but you’ll only get it if you defeat me.’

Arthur lay awake all night and tried to grasp what he thought he had understood.

They faced one another at the Club Championship. It wasn’t an important title, a single bout would decide it, there were no other competitors in their weight category, and it would actually have made more sense to award Joni the victory wreath without a fight. Arthur hadn’t beaten him in a single training session so far. There were, in fact, real bronzed oak-leaf wreaths with blue and white bows; Sally Steigrad placed a lot of value on such outward appearances, which was also why he complained about the fact that the Club still didn’t have a flag.

Luckily no one from the family had come, even though Hinda and Zalman had offered to support him. Arthur felt as if he had been caught every time someone asked him about his new-found passion for the sport, and sometimes became really bad-tempered, as if someone were touching the open wound of his bad conscience.

They stood facing one another on the mat, they established their holds, and Arthur’s hands trembled as they did every time he touched that body. It was a battle of wait-and-see, a clumsy dance, and soon, after hold and counterhold, their heads were quite close together, cheek to cheek, and Joni suddenly smiled his smile, a very private smile, and Arthur whispered, ‘A promise is a promise.’ Then he let himself fall in such a way that everyone would think Arthur had pulled him off his feet. The fight was over, and Arthur had defeated Joni.

When the put the wreath on his head — ‘Completely ridiculous, such decorations!’ he had always said, and never let it go for as long as he lived — when Joni stood in front of him and shook his head, surprising victor and fair loser, he heard the words for the second time. ‘When can I have an appointment with you, Doctor?’

It was a very ordinary consulting room, with the smell of illness and cleanliness and fear of death. The couch was narrow, so high that your legs dangled in the air if you sat on the edge, and a thick roll of paper was fastened at one end, the same rustling hygienic paper that hairdressers used for their head-rests. There was a desk in the room, an armchair behind it, a chair in front of it, a screen that concealed a clothes-stand, and a white-painted glass bookshelf in which textbooks jostled with specialist journals, and at the back in the second row, where it couldn’t be seen, Professor Hirschfeld’s Yearbook of Sexual Intermediary Stages , which Arthur scoured in vain for explanations for his own confusion. He had found only questionnaires, with which one was supposed to measure the female proportion of one’s own physicality: ‘Are your fingers pointed or blunt?’ ‘So you give off a noticeable smell in hot weather?’ ‘Do you think logically?’

No, he wasn’t thinking logically, and it worried him, and it gave him courage, and he couldn’t wait for the day he had agreed to see Joni.

It was a quite ordinary consulting room, but it was the most beautiful room in the world.

Joni had been just as uncertain as he, just as curious, and afterwards just as happy and exhausted.

Every time.

Afterwards, which was always also a before.

Arthur had immediately given up wrestling. He knew he couldn’t have gone on touching Joni without everyone noticing the way he was touching him. Once he had started awake from a dream in which they had met for a training session, the mat in the middle of his consulting room, onlookers had jostled all around, Sally Steigrad and Cantor Würzburger and also Uncle Salomon, even though he had died long ago, they had walked towards one another, Arthur and Joni, and Joni had thrown the curl out of his forehead, and Arthur had kissed him, he had kissed him in front of everyone, and Joni had smiled and said, ‘Oh, please, Doctor, when can I have another appointment with you?’

‘There’s something I have to discuss with you,’ said Joni.

The wrong words.

‘It has nothing to do with you,’ said Joni, and didn’t look at him, just stared at the glass book-case, which couldn’t provide any answers either, ‘just with me, and the fact that I’m nineteen now and have to think about what happens next.’

They had been the best years of Arthur’s life, and even before Joni went on talking he knew they were over.

‘I’m going into army training,’ said Joni, ‘so we won’t see each other for a long time anyway, and afterwards I may be going abroad. My uncle knows someone who has a paper factory in Linz, and there I can… But that’s not the reason. None of that is the reason. The reason is…’

The reason is that there are no miracles.

The reason is that one cannot be happy without being punished for it.

‘I’ve done a lot of thinking,’ said Joni. ‘The way you always think about things before you do them. I’ve learned a lot from you, you know. I’m grateful to you for that. Honestly: I’m grateful to you. But I’ve done a lot of thinking and reached the conclusion… It really has nothing to do with you.’

Your heart is torn from your body, but it has nothing to do with you.

‘I have reached the conclusion…’ said Joni, still sitting beside Arthur, he would only have needed to reach out his hand to touch him, to hold him, never to let him go.

But he didn’t have the right to do that.

‘I have reached the conclusion,’ said Joni, ‘that I’m a perfectly ordinary person. One like all the others. Nothing special. Not like you. Just a man who wants to have a family and children and… yes, and a wife. The way you do.’

The way you do.

‘It would also be the best thing for you. A family, I mean. You’d be a good father. A wonderful father, I’m sure of it. It’s always been lovely with you, really, it was lovely, and I’m not levelling any reproaches at you.’

Reproaches.

‘But it isn’t going anywhere. You understand what I mean? It isn’t going anywhere.’

And Arthur did the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, he did the most cowardly thing, the most contemptible, and said, ‘Yes, Joni, I understand you.’

Joni slipped from the couch and stood in the room as much of a stranger as if he had only come here by accident on his way to a quite different destination. Arthur saw him naked, one very last time. The physique was no longer that of a boy, now it was a man, just a man, a man like many others. He walked as if he was flat-footed, his legs were slightly too short and his bottom…