Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Arthur very slowly folded up his tallis, the fine one that Zalman had given him for his bar mitzvah, and just as he was putting the cloth back in its velvet case, he knew what he had to do. It was quite clear to him, beyond any doubt, and the fact that the matter would not have a happy conclusion made it all the more correct. ‘I wasn’t born to be happy,’ he said to himself, and he felt as if that was the answer that he had sought in vain in all the prayers.

Most of the men had left already. Hersch Wasserstein was now standing all on his own by the door of the prayer hall. Arthur walked over to him, and it seemed to be a very long way. ‘Herr Wasserstein,’ he said, ‘I would like to ask for your daughter’s hand.’

His own voice sounded strange to him, but the idea of walking under the marriage baldaquin with Chaje Sore, whom he barely knew, made his eyes quite moist.

Hersch Wasserstein made an uneasy scraping movement with his foot, as if stubbing out a cigarette. Then he looked Arthur in the eye, and his gaze was not that of a shnorrer. ‘It isn’t decent to mock the afflicted,’ he said.

He turned away and walked off, and nothing that Arthur said to him would make him come back.

‘You’re meshuga,’ said Hinda, when Arthur told her about it.

The siblings were sitting in the Kamionkers’ sukkah. The twins had taken a lot of trouble over decorating it; their father had had to bring home colourful scraps of fabric from work, and they had used them to create something almost like an oriental palace. That too was for Ruben.

‘I meant it quite seriously,’ Arthur assured her.

‘I know. That’s exactly the meshuganeh thing about it.’

‘If I’d married her then…’

‘You didn’t even know her.’

‘But if…’

It did Arthur good to argue in favour of his moral duties towards the Wassersteins, above all — even though he might not have admitted it to himself — because he knew that he would not win the debate. Hinda knew him too well.

‘You aren’t responsible for everything in this world,’ she said. ‘You are not the Lord God.’ And then Hinda, confident, ever-cheerful Hinda, suddenly started crying, wailing, threw her arms around her brother’s neck and whispered to him, ‘But if you are the Lord God — please, please bring my Ruben home to me.’

Arthur clumsily patted her back, and had the feeling that he was consoling himself.

Meanwhile Zalman was sitting in the back room of Pinchas’s shop, where the relief committee for Galician refugees had set up a makeshift office between sacks of lentils and barrels of pickled gherkins. Frau Okun, who had fled from Russia herself many years ago, acted as secretary, and the people coming to her for help seemed to like her brusque, matter-of-fact manner. Even too much empathy can be painful.

War pays no heed to feast days, so even today new refugees had arrived, who were supplied with absolute necessities and needed lodging somewhere for the first few nights. Zalman asked few questions: ‘if someone’s tongue is hanging from his throat, you don’t need to ask him if he’s thirsty.’ But of course he asked each one of them if he could tell him anything about the fate of the yeshiva of Kolomea. The front had been a few days’ journey away from the homes of these refugees, and today’s new arrivals came from a quite different area. Only one old man with a strange half-beard — a joker in Russian uniform had burned off the other half — thought he had heard that the rabbi had left the city with all his students, but couldn’t say where they had got to.

Zalman found lodging for all the refugees, told them where they could get something to eat and gave the sick and wounded the address of Arthur’s surgery. Then he carefully, without chivvying, recorded the details of the new arrivals on file cards, put them in order and passed the box to Frau Okun.

‘From tomorrow you will have to get by without me. I’m sure Pinchas will help you.’

‘And you?’

‘I’m going to Galicia,’ said Zalman. ‘I am a peaceful man, but this is about my son.’

He went to the barber’s, even though it was still Yontif, sat down on the chair with the revolving seat, laid his hands on the arm rests, felt the rustling paper against the back of his neck, took a deep breath, smelled hair water and pomade and soap, blew the air spluttering back out like someone emerging from water, and was ready.

Herr Dallaporta, who had now been in Switzerland for twenty-five years, and whose first shop had been destroyed in the disturbances of 1896, was surprised to see him. ‘Isn’t it Sunday for the Jews today?’ he asked, and Zalman replied. ‘Sometimes you have to work even on Sunday.’ They spoke in Zurich German, one of them with a Neapolitan, the other a Galician intonation. Neither man noticed the accent of the other.

‘The side whiskers,’ said Zalman. ‘They will have to go.’

Herr Dallaporta was an aesthetic person, and had even decorated a wall of his drawing room with a painting of Vesuvius done by himself. Zalman’s magnificent whiskers were a work of art, and one on which he himself had worked for many years, and destroying them struck him as blasphemy. ‘Why?’ he asked, and in a dramatic gesture that could as easily have had a Yiddish as an Italian accent, raised his hands to the heavens. ‘Emperor Franz Joseph does not have finer ones.’

‘That’s exactly why. Only an Austrian would wear such whiskers. And for the foreseeable future it is better if I don’t look like an Austrian.’

He had his moustache trimmed as he had worn it two decades before: bushy and not very tidy. When he came home with his new face, Hinda didn’t recognise him at first, when in fact it was only the old, young Zalman coming back to light. Rachel declared her altered father to be dashing, her favourite word of the moment, and only Lea, who like her grandmother Chanele had a keen eye for what people were up to, said straight away, ‘You’re up to something.’

He told them about his plan, which wasn’t yet a plan, but just an intention — ‘But doing nothing at all would be the worst possible plan’ — and they tried to dissuade him from it. He had been expecting that, and wouldn’t be put off. ‘You of all people must understand this,’ he said to Hinda. ‘Some things are non-negotiable.’

They went on debating with him when he was already packing his rucksack — ‘No, not a suitcase, I’m not going on holiday’ — they went on talking at him as he wrapped his big scissors and his sewing kit in a cloth — ‘You never know what you’re going to need’ — and when he went to the station without knowing where the trains even went, Pinchas and Arthur had turned up and were trying to persuade him that he was risking his life unnecessarily.

‘Unnecessarily?’ asked Zalman. ‘My son is there.’ And he pulled on his fingers until the joints cracked, as one brings a tool that one hasn’t used for a long time back into operation.

There might, the man at the counter said, still be trains for Cracow. But he would rather sell Zalman a ticket to Vienna, a choice for which he had a reassuringly everyday explanation: ‘If there is no connection, we can’t refund the ticket. According to our terms and conditions, acts of war count as an act of God, and then you’d be throwing your money away.’

Zalman bought a ticket to Vienna, one-way. He almost said, ‘If I don’t come back, it would be throwing my money away.’

Pinchas hadn’t really expected to be able to dissuade him from his decision, and now, murmuring a prayer, stuffed a huge piece of smoked meat into his rucksack. It would turn out to be a very precious gift.

‘And where are you going to sleep on the way?’ Arthur asked, as if nothing could be more important.