Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Gluteus maximus. Just a muscle. Which started here and here and stopped there and there and moved that and that.

The screen was a three-part metal frame stretched with pleated beige material, and Joni disappeared behind it, as all patients did after their examination, they disappeared, you heard a rustle, and eventually they reappeared and were dressed and armoured and belonged only to themselves.

Arthur sat on the edge of the couch for a long time. He touched the leather covering where Joni had been sitting and thought he felt a last trace of his warmth.

Joni didn’t return to the gymnastics club after military training. Neither did he go to Linz, which had just been an excuse; he now had other interests, he had broadened both inwardly and outwardly, had lost his narrow-hipped youthfulness and grown into a shape of which there were many copies in the world. Of course they met repeatedly, Zurich was small and Jewish Zurich still smaller, but Joni only had his public smile left for Arthur, he had decided not to remember the other smile. When he greeted him, he was polite and detached, a pupil meeting a teacher long after the end of his school days.

Eventually Sally Steigrad contacted Arthur, visited him at home and brought with him two bottles of beer which they — ‘No ceremony among fellow sportsmen!’ — drank without glasses. Sally was a long, thin man, for whom the club was more important than his family. not because he didn’t have one, on the contrary, the Steigrad family comprised countless siblings and cousins, and their policies brought him, an insurance salesman, a decent income as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But policies don’t make life interesting. It was in the competitions he made his gymnasts take part in as often as possible that Sally sought excitement; in terms of his character, he said, he was a global traveller or conqueror, and he liked to complain that everything in his life was so orderly and regulated, he sometimes felt as if all he had to do before he died was tick off due dates, and no surprises of any kind were factored into his life’s plan. Although of course one always had to reckon with surprises, even unpleasant ones. And while they were on the subject: had Arthur ever thought of taking out life insurance?

But that wasn’t what he had come about, it really wasn’t, although they should have a quiet talk about the topic another time, ‘better safe than sorry’ as the English said, and they were hardly stupid people. When Sally turned to the topic of insurance, there was something automatic about his words, a gramophone that starts singing away from wherever the needle happens to fall in the groove. As he talked, he bobbed up and down as if an over-abundant temperament wouldn’t leave him in peace for a moment, and appraised Arthur’s modest furniture like an auctioneer evaluating an inheritance. But insurance wasn’t the reason for his visit today, it really wasn’t, Sally said and sat down at last, today he didn’t want a signature from Arthur, but something quite different — to get straight to the point — he wanted to win him back to the gymnastics club.

‘No,’ said Arthur.

Never again.

‘Not as an active member,’ Sally reassured him. Arthur had never, and he wasn’t to be offended by his frankness, been a Karl Schuhmann, he would recognise the name, only five foot six and four gold medals. Arthur’s mind, Sally had often observed, had never been entirely on the subject, ‘as if you were thinking about something other than victory’, but that was what intellectuals were like. He, Sally, imagined the medical profession as a big adventure, something that demanded the whole person, not like insurance, in which everything was already planned out and prescribed by central office. Arthur should, just by the by, think of taking out household insurance, he didn’t own much now, but the leather armchairs they were sitting in were very pretty, and if he ever got married they could ramp up the premiums.

But back to the topic at hand. He didn’t want to bring Arthur back into the club as a wrestler, but as a doctor. It had recently become customary, and he thought it made perfect sense, to have a representative of the medical profession on the spot, mostly they were only nurses, and once, which he had found completely ridiculous, a dentist had even turned up at a wrestling competition, could Arthur imagine? if someone had dislocated a joint he would probably have reached for his drill, ha ha ha.

Little jokes like that had helped Sally conclude many a deal.

So, to get to the point: what did Arthur think of the idea of making himself available as the club doctor? It wouldn’t take as much time as active sport, he trained to a certain extent in his daily practice, ha ha ha, and perhaps — it didn’t have to be so, but it was a timely thought — perhaps he could occasionally give the young people a kind of course, medically correct relaxation before training, the anatomical foundations of competitive sport. Just things like that.

To his own surprise Arthur heard himself saying ‘yes’, not ‘yes, he would think about the suggestion,’ but quite rashly and directly ‘yes’. Sally Steigrad attributed this spontaneous agreement to his own powers of persuasion and saw, once again, confirmation of his credo that arguments in the insurance trade are more important than forms.

Arthur assumed his new duties for two reasons. On the one hand he felt a debt towards the gymnastics club, and it was part of his character always to feel most himself when he thought he was atoning for something, and on the other hand he hoped — an essay in the Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Stages had led him to this thought — that regular harmless contact with young men would have an inoculating effect on him, just as a dilute pathogen protects the body against the outbreak of illness.

And he knew that there would be no second Joni among the gymnasts, because there could never again be a second Joni.

If it was a penance that he had taken upon himself, it was one of a not unpleasant kind. Arthur had only just celebrated his thirty-third birthday, but since Joni had ended their relationship he had aged, not exactly like Rabbi ben Ezra, who was said to have turned overnight into a dignified old man, but like someone for whom memory has become more important than the future. The young gymnasts treated him, out of respect for his profession, and indeed for or his age, with a certain distance, and he appreciated that. It was part of his character always to re-examine himself, just as there are people who turn around three times just to check that the front door is locked, and each time he did so he established, reassured and a little disappointed, that there was nothing there.

There would never be anything there again.

When Sally Steigrad, in the pub where they drank beer after training, started talking about the need for a club flag, whose acquisition was indispensable because one would otherwise simply make oneself ridiculous at gymnastics festivals — ‘we can’t just tie a tallis to a stick and carry it around in front of us, after all’ — Arthur voluntarily assumed the task of drumming up the money. He would, he reasoned, dedicate the flag to Joni, only in his own thoughts, of course, but they were what mattered in the end.

He was so pleased with the idea that he didn’t even contradict Sally when he wanted to fix a date for the consecration of the flag. They agreed on 28 June of the following year, ‘which gives you nine months’, Sally said, ‘and nine months, I don’t need to explain to a doctor, is enough to create something with functioning limbs, hahaha.’ That was a joke that he liked to trot out for young married couples.

However the self-appointed task proved almost impossible. Arthur did the rounds of Jewish businessmen, but hardly won a concrete agreement from anyone, even though he was always given a very polite welcome. People are always polite to doctors, perhaps for fear of not being treated properly should they fall ill.