Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Typical of the increasingly long list of his disappointments was his visit to Siegfried Weill, the father of Désirée’s friend Esther.

‘Bureau’, it said on the door; the French spelling was probably supposed to upgrade the desk squeezed between the shelves to something more elevated, but it was just a store-room directly behind the shop, and the chair that Herr Weill had offered him was actually meant for salesmen, who tend to stay too long if they’re sitting comfortably.

With his deep voice and black beard, Herr Weill looked like a licensed German rabbi. He radiated imposing dignity, which he was well aware of, and which he liked to deploy as a sales technique. He would confirm hesitant lady customers in their decisions with such a sermon-like ‘A very good choice, Madame!’ that afterwards they rarely dared to go and look elsewhere. He used a pair of ladies’ buttoned ankle-boots, chevreaux leather with patent toecaps, to explain to Arthur why — ‘to my great regret, and even though I see great value in supporting the gymnastics club as such’ — sadly, sadly he could not take part in the collection of money. ‘Look at this shoe,’ he said, and with a solemn gesture held out the open cardboard box to Arthur, ‘one of our most popular models, American in origin. On sale for eighteen francs. And now tell me, Doctor: what does this shoe cost me? If I include everything, transport, rent, wages, taxes? What does the shoe cost me?’

Arthur had no idea. ‘Fifteen francs?’ he said hesitantly.

‘Fifteen francs! Halevei! If I were to buy a pair of shoes for fifteen francs and sell them for eighteen, twenty per cent rewech, it would be a hanoe to me to pay for your flag, and the flagpole too!’ He shook his head, like a sage over the sins of this world, repeatedly lamenting, ‘Fifteen francs, he says! Why not make if fourteen?’

And in any case, said Herr Weill, one had been so overrun of late by shnorrers — ‘Do not take the word amiss, Doctor!’ — like wasps in a hot summer they were, and then of course there were the regular obligations too: if you was called up to the Torah in synagogue, you had to shnoder something, and apart from those charitable donations he also paid his shekels for the construction work in Palestine — he wasn’t one of those diehard Zionists, but one didn’t want to stand aside completely — and otherwise there was always this and that, in short: sorry thought he was, in this case he would have to say no. But if the Jewish Gymnastics Club undertook to buy all its sports shoes from him in future, then he would offer a ten per cent discount, what was he saying, fifteen per cent! Just so that the doctor could see that he was very positive on the subject.

That was the response that Arthur got wherever he went; the money simply wouldn’t come together. When he had gone all the way through the list of businessmen, the firm commitments came to less than a hundred francs. And a flag, even a modest one, cost at least four times as much as that.

Next June, which had seemed an infinite distance away only a short time before, was now suddenly, it seemed to Arthur, practically on his doorstep. Sally Steigrad called meetings in which the design was discussed, he had also already drawn up a list of the halls where the big ball might be held — ‘Of course there must be a ball, if you’re going to do something, do it properly!’ — and at the flag-makers’ they had told Arthur that three months was the least, the very least, he could expect; now that everyone was thinking about the national exposition in Bern, they were drowning in commissions.

Arthur didn’t dare knock on his father’s door again; Janki hadn’t recovered at all in the summer resort on Sylt, and had been constantly depressed since then. Being separated from his shop, with its smell of old spices, was harder for him than he had expected.

There was only one last possibility.

Arthur’s relationship with François had never been easy. As a child he had been unable to put into words the breathless admiration he felt for his big brother; even then he had found it hard to talk about emotions. Later, when he had perhaps found the words, the opportunity never arose, even though by now they both lived in Zurich. An ambitious businessman, who is already married and has a son, is worlds apart from a young medical student, and Arthur had felt as if the age difference between them was distancing them further and further; the more adult François seemed to him, the more immature he felt himself.

And then François had had himself baptised, and that had introduced such awkwardness into their relationship that nothing cordial could arise to combat it. One of Arthur’s teachers at grammar school had had a flaming red growth on his forehead that everyone had to ignore and yet couldn’t ignore, and that was exactly what he felt about François’s Christianity: the effort not to mention it all the time silenced all conversation.

But it was possible to talk to Mina.

François had had a villa built on the Zurichberg, in the new quarter near the university. The building was generous but lifeless, a mere stage, and Mina, who was supposed to be the mistress of the house, moved around the big rooms like an actress who hasn’t been given the script of her play. A janitor who looks after other people’s properties without having any claims to them herself.

‘No, Arthur, you aren’t a burden at all. This house is arranged for guests. We could have twenty-four people to dinner if there were twenty-four people who would accept an invitation from us.’ She said such things without bitterness, she was just establishing facts, and in her uncomplaining directness she resembled her mother-in-law Chanele.

A maid with a cap and apron served them tea. They had taken a seat at a little cast-iron table in the conservatory, where in spite of the cool autumn day it was almost too warm. Arthur admired a little orange tree with perfectly formed fruit hanging from its branches, and Mina followed his gaze and said, ‘As long as you don’t try to eat them…’

She thought it entirely possible that François could be persuaded to make a donation.

‘Even though…?’ Arthur couldn’t bring himself to ask the question, but Mina answered it anyway.

‘That’s why. François likes to stress that nothing has actually changed for him, that people are just too narrow-minded, too fixated on outward appearances to understand that he’s still the same person he was before… So why shouldn’t he support the Jewish Gymnastics Club?’

‘And? Is he still the same person?’

Mina poured a few drops of milk from the silver jug into her tea, added sugar, stirred it and drank. ‘Have a piece of cake,’ she said.

‘Is François still the same person?’

‘I fear so.’

‘Strange,’ thought Arthur, ‘that one can feel more closely related to a sister-in-law than to one’s own brother.’

When François came home he was in an excellent mood, and treated the presence of Arthur, even though he hadn’t seen him for months, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Good to see you here. I have something to show you. I’ve just got it.’ He waved a long green cardboard tube, a child proudly presenting a new toy, and in his enthusiasm almost knocked over one of the many flower-holders that turned the conservatory into a little civilised jungle.

He was in such a hurry that he didn’t even take the time to remove his jacket; he just threw his hat on one of the ornate wicker chairs. They had to follow him into the drawing-room, where he pushed the low table aside to make enough room on the floor. He knelt down, still in his coat, took a long parchment-coloured roll of paper out of the cardboard packaging and had Arthur pass him two heavy, polished ashtrays to fix one end of it down on the carpet. Then he unrolled the paper so carefully and almost tenderly that Arthur was reminded of the unrolling of the Torah in the service, although that comparison was more than out of place with François.