Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Arthur noticed that his father was repeatedly clutching the left side of his chest, and the doctor in him was already looking for the illness to match this symptom. But in fact Janki was only reaching for the manuscript of his speech as flag sponsor. ‘Just don’t talk too much about the Battle of Sedan,’ Arthur said as a joke. His father looked at him severely and replied: ‘I wasn’t even at Sedan.’

The old Kahns, Mina’s parents, came by and congratulated Arthur with pointed cordiality on his production of the children’s display. They ignored Janki and Chanele, the parents of a son-in-law who had had himself geshmat, equally pointedly. Mina herself, of course, hadn’t come.

When Arthur had finally fought his way through to the family table, his seat was already occupied. On the last chair, right next to Désirée, sat Joni Leibowitz.

‘I have taken the liberty of introducing myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve already told Fräulein Pomeranz that we are very good friends. We are friends, aren’t we?’ The threat in his voice could not be ignored.

‘Of course,’ said Arthur. What else was he supposed to say?

‘Then I’m sure you won’t mind if I occupy your seat for a little longer.’ Joni stroked his young moustache, took a drag on a cigarette and smiled at Désirée from behind the smoke with slightly narrowed eyes, just as the lovers did in the picture house. ‘One seldom encounters such charming company.’

Lea and Rachel looked on enviously — ‘Not even a ball-gown, and already an admirer!’ — and in the shade of her ostrich-feather hat Mimi smiled as contentedly as if she had created Joni Leibowitz in person.

Arthur would have liked to flee, but he couldn’t immediately find an excuse. Luckily Sally Steigrad had become accustomed to treating him as his personal adjutant, to whom all unpleasant tasks could be passed, and just at the right moment — in the form of a hastily dispatched young gymnast — a messenger appeared on Sally’s behalf, urgently summoning Arthur back behind the stage. A noisy argument had broken out there between two young ladies, a Fräulein Horn and a Fräulein Jacobsohn, about the home-made donation from the ladies’ squad. They were both supposed to hand over to the flag-bearer the accessories concomitant with his office, and were now, at the very last moment, tearing out each other’s carefully coiffed hair over who was to hand him the glove and who place the embroidered scarf around his neck. Arthur unburdened all his dammed-up despair upon them, yelled at them so loudly and with such pointless violence that it must have been audible through the curtain and all the way into the hall. No one was used to hearing this man, normally so mild and reticent, using such tones, and the startled ladies very quickly reached an agreement.

Sally Steigrad put his hand on Arthur’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m excited too, but one must be able to maintain one’s composure.’

The act of consecration began with an orchestral prelude for which Monsieur Fleur-Vallée had borrowed extensively from Richard Wagner. When the curtain opened at last, all the gymnasts, male and female, were standing to attention on the stage, with Sally and Arthur in the front row. The flag-bearer — chosen because of his imposing physique — stepped forward and allowed the representatives of the ladies’ squad to hand him the insignias of his office. After Fräulein Jacobsohn had handed him the scarf, she kissed him on the cheek, at which point Arthur also realised why the two ladies had been arguing so violently about the task.

The flag-bearer, so charmingly fitted for his function, left the stage before stepping back onto it with the wrapped flag in his fist. He was followed by Janki Meijer, who, supporting himself on his walking stick with the silver lion’s-head handle, slowly and solemnly limped to the lectern.

As flag sponsor he had prepared an address that included lots about masculinity and courage, and in which the gymnasts were compared with all kinds of heroes, from the Maccabees to the founders of Switzerland. Only his family noticed that Janki untypically avoided drawing the obvious connection with his own heroic feats in the Franco-Prussian War. Chanele listened to her husband with observant concern, and moved her lips mutely as if she were at a service. He had read his address out loud to her so often, in all its new versions, that she could speak along with it by heart.

Janki hadn’t even got halfway through his speech when a murmur arose in a corner of the hall, one that couldn’t be silenced even with shushing hisses from the other tables, but which instead gradually took hold of other parts of the hall, just as a glowing ember eats its way through dry wood before suddenly turning into wildfire.

Janki paused irritably. Chanele had warned him several times that his speech was far too long; it was probably better to skip a whole passage, perhaps the one in which he described Old Testament figures as prototypes of modern athletes, David with his sling as the first marksman and Samson as the model of all strongmen. Perhaps he should cut straight to the end, he thought, and get without further ado to the handover of the new flag to the association. If only one knew what was going on down there in the hall.

What was going on had nothing to do with Janki and his address. It was world history which, as is world history’s wont, disturbed the flag consecration of the Jewish Gymnastics Association at the worst possible moment. In the streets outside special editions of the paper were being sold by shouting newsboys, and one of them had made its way into the big hall of the Volkshaus. Herr Knüsel, senior salesman with Schuhhaus Weill, was the bearer of bad news, because he felt obliged to tell his boss, who bought in all sorts of goods from all over the world, about what had happened straight away. The heir to the Austrian throne, Franz Ferdinand, had been shot in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo; the murderer was a nineteen-year-old schoolboy and his name was Princip. Whether he had acted alone or as part of a plot was not yet known with any certainty, but a telegram had arrived from Berlin saying that the signs of a Greater Serbian conspiracy had been piling up for some time, and it had even said in a special edition of the Vienna Freie Presse , that the Serbian ambassador had expressly warned the Archduke against travelling to Bosnia. One could only speculate about the consequences of the bloody deed, but — and in this conviction the people in the street were just as united as the people in the Volkshaus hall — they were bound to be terrible.

There were whispers and soon loud discussions at all the tables; it was only on the stage that no one yet knew where the sudden disturbance was coming from. Out of fear of finally losing his thread, Janki didn’t dare to shorten his speech, instead rattling his text off with ever greater speed. The unveiling of the new flag, which was actually the absolute highlight of the evening, was acknowledged only by a few stalwarts with fleeting applause, and the heralded programme of artistic entertainment (songs performed by Frau Modes-Wolf and Jewish recitations by Herr Karl Leser) was cancelled completely. Not even the tombola draw could be carried out in an orderly fashion; Sally Steigrad was obliged to publish the winning numbers two weeks later in the Israelitisches Wochenblatt . He still tried at least to let them perform the pyramid, the traditional finale of any gymnastics party, but it proved completely impossible to prise even half of the participants away from the discussion groups that had formed all around the hall.

Neither was there any dancing. When the musicians of the orchestra packed their instruments away, Rachel burst into tears and had to be comforted by her twin sister.